


Suburbia: Gore, Grubs, & Parenting in a House with a White Picket Fence

by RainofLittleFishes



Series: Suburbia [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Cute Kids, Gore for live grub birth, Grief/Mourning, Grub Death, Grubs, Kink Meme, OOC Cronus, Pregnancy, Pregnant Trolls, but please don't be scared - there are far more feels and cute kids than bad things!, chapter 5 is basically porn, chapter 7 contains it's own warning, here there be, love so hard it hurts, parenting, trollpreg
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-02
Updated: 2015-01-02
Packaged: 2018-03-04 18:45:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 23,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3082253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RainofLittleFishes/pseuds/RainofLittleFishes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cronus is a good cop. Kankri teaches at the local community college. They're a typical young married troll couple in a small town in Illinois. They're expecting their first grub(s), which is the most exceptional thing about them, considering that it's not impossible to adopt and troll grubs are born live and chew their way out. Carrying your own is still a new frontier and modern medicine has little to contribute. Surviving is one thing. Parenting is entirely another. </p><p>Welcome to the glory and heartbreak therein.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Kankri: Prove Yourself to Yourself

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lizardlicks](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lizardlicks/gifts).



In the midnight swelter of August you surface from unnerving dreams to the certainty that something is wrong.

In the moments after nightmares of sweltering, suffocating, drowning, you try to reassure yourself, press a hand to your stretched abdomen, grub quiet.

The room is barely lit by the gleam of street lights through the open windows. The air is thick and humid and it takes several minutes for your heart to slow, mind still convinced that you’re drowning.

It’s not rare for periods of quiet, mostly, you assume, when the grub is sleeping, as opposed to kicking your kidneys, stomping your bladder, flipping entirely off the handle into loop-de-loops, or disapproving of your meals and other life choices.

You fully expect this grub to be the most contrary wriggler on Earth. It usually only sleeps when you’re walking or talking, spends your sleep cycle trying to keep you awake. You have been exhausted for a solid four months, unable to work for the last two. You have surrendered all your summer classes to TAs and resigned yourself to continuing your immersive personal research on grub development. Most of this consists of dissection diagrams, anecdotal horror stories, and theory, especially about all the things that can go wrong. It does not make for peaceable dreams.

Cronus’s sister Porrim has agreed to be your second should you need help in extracting the grub. She moved in at the start of summer in case your hand hesitates when it needs to strike true, in case you need help after. She sleeps in the second bedroom, the low grub pen still unassembled in a corner, she reads and sews in the family room, goes for long walks in the marginally cooler air of night. Sometimes, when nothing else works, she reads ridiculous fantasy romances out loud to calm your grub when you desperately need some sleep and nothing else settles it. You have never had anyone but Cronus so close into your space, so constantly, and her presence is by turns reassuring and suffocating.

Your sweet lover, all Beforan and raised by human parents, has taken to regarding you with worry, like he regrets putting you through this, like maybe he regrets confessing his desire for a child. You regret nothing, forge forward with the grim certainty of a path too far traveled to go back, but hope, desperately, for all of your sakes, that everyone survives your adventures in the Alternian equivalent of pregnancy. You don’t want to die. You don’t want to fail. You don’t want to break your beloved into pieces.

You are Alternian bred, if not raised, and you wonder if your pragmatism is you personality alone or some distant grub memory of the caverns. The Alternian Empire and the Beforan people have reached an uneasy peace, centuries after their schism. The latter belongs to a Federation of space-faring planets and peoples. The former has overstretched itself and partially collapsed.

In the regrouping, the balance of power shifted. The Federation does not officially encourage Alternian refugees, nor acts of treason, of which every Alternian refugee is guilty. However, there is currently no extradition treaty for either side and every Alternian that manages to hit Federation space and plead amnesty has been accepted, even if it was just to one of the mining planets where indentured criminals are sent.

In exchange for medical technologies and troll-appropriate pharmaceuticals, Alternia has agreed to send the Beforans new bloodlines. In typical backhanded and clawed Alternian fashion, these mostly consist of cullbait grubs, maimed and traumatized wrigglers, and the occasional deliberately dangerous criminal. You know that both sides consider the other stupid for accepting these terms.

You choose to consider the fact that you, a warmblood mutant clearly outside the hemospectrum, made it safely to Earth without missing any parts, or damage worse than a few nightmares, proof that there are good trolls among the Alternians, some of whom are clearly gaming the system.

*

You feel a sudden internal thrashing and your round belly, stretched to the limits, streaked with almost iridescent stretch marks, bulges yet more under your hand. And then you feel a sharp pinch. It’s almost a month early, but you have no doubt the grub is making a break for it right now.

You grab your phone and send an urgent message to Porrim and to Cronus’s partner. The grub is having trouble sinking its teeth in, still underdeveloped, but from the intensity of the pinch, has likely made it through its caul. Outside the sac, it will soon break its cord, and then it will only have a limited amount of oxygen before it starts to suffocate. Grubs in the beginning stages of oxygen deprivation can still chew, but they might not be headed in the right direction. They might survive, but they can’t outrun the brain damage. You have made a vow. You will not die. You will not fail.

Your lever yourself out of the recliner that has been the only way you can sleep without Cronus to prop you up, and you waddle to the kitchen as fast as you dare, slapping lights on as you go. Your claws are sharp and as clean as you can manage, but this will still be easier with a knife.

You get almost twin beeps back, Porrim, five minutes away, no doubt running, and Senior Trooper Egbert, about the same. You hope that Egbert is driving. It’s a Saturday and lately they’ve been assigned to keep the peace and keep watch for erratic drivers as the bars let out two towns northeast of here. It’s a miracle that they are so close by.

The grub is thrashing now, gripping a small bite of you and trying to shake it until it gives. It hurts, but not as much as it should if it were making any progress.

You strip off your shirt, grab the emergency kit, toss the blanket on the linoleum, shove one of Cronus’s cheery sunflower dishtowels in between your teeth, douse your front and hands in the disinfectant, kneel, count off the seconds for the disinfectant to work.

Your brace yourself against the wall, take a breath, already straining through your clenched teeth, and you strike the knife down your front. It hurts so much worse than the grub’s small bite. Almost a month early, the tiny precious parasite can’t exude the chemicals that would make this less painful. You are hoping that their lungs are developed enough to survive.

You haven’t gotten all the way through, you don’t want to hit the grub, you don’t want to spill yourself across the floor.

The front door crashes open. “Kankri?!” You don’t reply, panting too harshly, teeth clenched on the towel. The grub has found the weakened spot, is pushing and biting and thrashing again. You drop the knife and sink claws right above and below its desperate head, open yourself.

There’s a hot spill of amniotic fluid down your front. You’re not sure if you’re missing any time, because Porrim is there, washing her hands in the sink, kneeling in your spill. Cronus and Egbert are there and you have an irrational thought, he’s never even entered your house before, and now he’s standing in your cheery kitchen under the moobeast clock’s ticking tail, watching you sink your hands into the gaping maw of your abdomen, a cracked flapbeast egg, ridden with the spill of your organs and a grub. Cronus’s eyes are wide and shocked, his ears pinned, he looks like he wants to help and doesn’t want to hurt you.

“Wash your hands,” Porrim barks, and suddenly he’s at the sink. She pushes at your hands until you’re holding yourself open and you rest your eyes on her steady gaze at your belly. You don’t want to look further down. You hear a tiny inhale and cough. You look down just in time to catch a view of the butt end of your grub as it dives back in. “Oh,” comes the thought, “Is it really red?”

“It’s not uncommon,” Porrim reassures you. “It will hurt like hell, but you’ll both be fine.” She connects the two incisions with one sharp careful movement.

But reds of your shade are uncommon. This is the first time you haven’t been singular. You blink at her and realize that she means grubs might spend all that time gnawing their way out only to dive back in. Yes, you know this. It’s one of the several reasons not having a second can kill you, even if this isn’t Alternia, where predators would take advantage of your gaping vulnerability.

She edges one long-boned hand into you, and you are grateful that you won’t have to try to pry the grub from your organs without worsening things for you both.

She doesn’t get far in before something’s pushing back out.

“How strange,” you think, you had thought the grub was red.

The grub pushing out of you, rump first, is clearly yellow, but pale, still.

Porrim guides it out, taps it gently. In her palms, you realize it’s not breathing.

The red grub pushes out head first, almost dropping out as the yellow clears. You catch it and almost choke on the towel in pain. It’s heavier than you expected, though you should have known better considering this is probably the one that’s spent its non-sleeping time dancing on your bladder. You cradle it in one arm, the other under it, crossed over your burning gap. It’s panting softly. You want to reassure it, but it already hurts too much to think of anything more ambitious than breathing. Cronus is behind you and you slump against him. His arms are bare to the shoulder and smell of kitchen soap, a welcome distraction from the smell of your spill. He supports your arm under the grub. It blocks your view of the wreckage of your front.

Porrim is trying to suction the yellow’s airways with a tiny device. You close your eyes and try to breathe and try to pray. Time skips forward again. Senior Trooper Egbert is kneeling next to Porrim, two gentle fingers providing compressions on the tiny body, his other hand trapping it against hers, four hands working in concert. There’s a cough and the sound of liquid in lungs, but the grub starts to breathe, coughs out until it’s breathing with less of the crackle. Porrim wraps it in one of the bright cocoons her sewing machine has been spitting out, cracks the crystal in a hand-warmer and slips it in the pocket. Time skips and Egbert is cradling it against himself, intently watching to be sure it doesn’t stop breathing.

The red grub is still except for its panting, and then it sneezes. Cronus snags another clean dishtowel and wraps it one-handed, so that it’s now a tiny fuzzy black head on a fuzzy pastel plaid grub body. You huff a laugh into your dishtowel and your entire body reminds you that that is a Really Bad Idea.

Porrim asks you if you want painkillers for while she washes you out and stitches you up. You drop the dishcloth to hiss out a “yessss”. You let your head sink back onto Cronus’s shoulder and you feel a prick in your thigh, feel her gently remove the red grub from your arms. The painkiller, a lab-produced version of what your grubs are too young to secrete, is more often used for surgeries unrelated to Emergence. It works quickly. You’re pretty sure you tell Cronus that if he wants another mammalian style spawning, he gets to carry the next one, but it’s fuzzy, then it’s dark.


	2. “I, For One, Welcome Our New Grubby Overlord.”

When October rolls around and Karkat is not quite two months, he makes his first public appearance at the Grenville County Police Departments’ Annual Family Harvest Potluck. Prior to this you’ve been too sore to get past the porch, but the potluck is tradition and Cronus has promised you a comfortable chair and all the fetch and carry you desire. Karkat is sleeping now in naps of varying lengths, interspersed with energetic rambling every bit as aggressive as you had guessed from his gestation.

Cronus helps you out of the car and settles you in a cushioned Adirondack chair from which you’re positive you won’t be able to extract yourself without help. At least it’s not likely to collapse or wobble like most of the temporary seating at these events.

Cronus settles Karkat in your lap, settles the grubbag on the ground beside you. You pet your grub’s soft hair. Still asleep, he flips over and mouths at your fingers, not quite biting.

Senior Trooper Egbert brings you a cup of ice water. “Thank you,” you tell him, as you catch your breath, and he seems to understand it’s not just for the water.

“You’re welcome to call me Phil, you know,” he replies. His blue eyes are sort of twinkling at you, his mustache bunches with his smile.

“Thank you, Phil.” You confirm, and he pats your arm once, not quite intrusive, and leaves you to the next visitor, of what turns out to be a small informal drift of curious and friendly well-wishers.

Everyone seems honestly happy to see your newest addition, to see you, and you are plied by several home cooks with both well wishes and homemade food, until the plates line the wide arms of the chair on both sides.

Karkat wakes up and begins his campaign of winning hearts with toothy smiles and grumpy frowns and surprisingly loud squeaks and chirps. Cronus is beaming and you realize how selfish it would have been to stay home when he so badly wants to show off both of you to his station family.

The first of the moose steaks and burgers come off the grill and you shoo Cronus off to fetch you one. Phil’s wife Anne, a tall graceful professor of physics at the University of Chicago, commandeers the chair next to you, handing you yet another plate, this one crowned with a slice of Phil’s double layer pumpkin praline cake. You crave meat all the time, but sugar is a close second.

Anne, with her brilliant mind and low slow southern honey voice, is your usual ally at station family get-togethers. You find yourself smiling more widely, more honestly, knowing you have backup. Her hair today is a series of braids wrapped into a crown, a white flower tucked in, an elegant contrast to her dark complexion. Most of the well-wishers are satisfied with having performed some variety of hello or aww-so-cute and have headed off for food or to herd their own spawn, leaving the two of you to chat.

You have never witnessed Anne to be less than enviably composed and you hope someday you will hit a super-secret level of Alternian second puberty that unlocks the secret to growing up to be Anne. Considering the parenting discussions with Cronus in which you agreed to lie regarding the existence of not one but two supernatural beings that break and enter to make contractual exchanges with wrigglers, this is not the worse of your delusions.

Anne and Phil’s three year old, Rosie, no longer quite hiding behind Anne, seems fascinated by Karkat, who has managed to dip all his legs into your cake and lick them successively until he has stuffed both hindmost legs into his mouth. You say this with all the affection and devotion of an exhausted parent; he looks like an extremely smug but adorable pillbug. Since a smile so far can mean anything from he’s satisfied to he’s about to make a deposit, you keep a wary eye on him. It’s impossible to diaper a grub without impeding at least the bottom set of legs, but you’ve become a quick draw with the potty pads and if you pay close enough attention to his expressions, you can usually protect your lap from accidents.

Anne lifts Rosie up into the short available area of her lap, and Rosie gifts you a small beautiful smile before crowding in, leaning into the chair arm, narrowly missing planting her elbows in the plates there. You get ready to catch her if she falls forward, but even at three Rosie is already showing her mother’s grace and an almost preternatural self-possession. By comparison to his ladies, even efficient Phil is almost ponderous. You wonder whom their new baby will take after.

Cronus returns with your moose steak sandwich, and you devour it faster than you intended. Your body is still hunting for resources to repair itself and you can’t seem to get enough protein.

Part of the annual harvest potluck tradition is that a gaggle of off duty officers drive a van ten plus hours north and into Canada to bring back a moose for the event, or be shamed to show up without.

This is evidently Serious Business (the beast in your hungry aching innards agrees) and requires not only a two or three night stay in primitive conditions but also the consumption of cheap beer, food from cans, a great deal of pack-bonding/bragging, and a permit application process that starts in May. Cronus went last year and came back wearing the pong of four days of no showering and campfire smoke, smiling like he’d just scrimmaged with his college rugby team.

Of course, not everyone who goes is actually hunting. Cronus was on the rifle team in college, passes all the regular range tests, and is deadly serious about firearm safety, but he still cries at Old Yeller and he might put an animal down, or a person if it came to it, but there’s absolutely, positively no way he’s field dressing a moose unless it’s the last meat source available and Karkat’s crying huge fat wriggler tears.

Last year Officer Wills from two districts over had the honor of making the kill. This year’s moose was brought down by your town’s tiny Ahn Lee, who used her new won laurels to impose her will on the return trip: no more peeing in bottles to trim five to ten minutes off the return trip. You know that you are not the only spouse here that hopes that common sense is contagious.

Karkat gets antsy and you distract him with the last bit of meat. Rosie tickles his belly when he finishes it and his eyes go wide, like he’s not sure if this is an acceptable development or he might need to register a complaint. Rosie laughs, tiny white baby teeth suddenly flashing in an unreserved happiness and your grub laughs back, a tiny chime that you’ve never heard before, that you want to set in your mind so that you never forget.

Police Chief Redglare cruises over like a shark among smaller fish and examines your spawn from behind her reflective glasses. She graces you with a tiny twitch of a smirk, your spawn with the same. She is angled away from Cronus when she renders her judgment in an implacable tone that reveals nothing of her expression.

“Acceptable, Ampora, carry on.”

She cruises off and, not for the first time, you wonder what made an Alternian adult choose Earth as a destination, whom she crossed that she ended up out in suburbia instead of Chicago, or any other big city rampant with more violent and interesting crime.

A few more curious visitors circle in once she moves along. Anne helps you keep the flow of conversation going with your visitors. No one says or does anything especially awkward, yourself thankfully included, and you seem to have obtained a certain level of credit among the adults who know what an emergence involves.

You know that between the few of you, Cronus, Porrim, Phil, probably Anne, and the county coroner who comes every year and is carefully staying at the other end of things today, there’s a shelter for your secret grief. You are grateful that that at least is not a public spectacle.

*

At some point in the strange stretch of time between the emergence and the October potluck, Porrim told you that she would take care of sending out birth announcements, and so she did.

On the front of the card is a serene Karkat, stuffed inside a tiny green knitted peapod while still asleep.

“Please Welcome Karkat Vantas-Ampora, August, 20th, 2011, Fox Bluffs, IL, USA, Earth” it enjoins.

It lists only the name and date, none of the usual statistics of height and weight that human birth announcements reel off like short descriptions of tiny criminals on the lam.

The back showcases two smaller photos in the same habiliment in two more states: awake and awake and fussy. It is simultaneously adorable and like Earth’s most atrociously inappropriate Christmas decoration. The back caption reads, “I, For One, Welcome Our New Grubby Overlord.”

When Karkat is old enough to find this and be embarrassed, you, for one, are not above blaming Auntie Porrim.


	3. An explanation of a great deal

At 5:31am, when toddler Karkat regularly launches himself onto your previously sleeping bodies, and with unerring precision, lands on your bladder, or bone bulge, or head-butts you in the kidneys, EVERY SINGLE TIME, you remind yourself how lucky you are that he’s so healthy.

The little yellow, tiny precious face, four tiny precious hornbuds, tiny coughs, tiny sparks, huge beautiful unfocused eyes, had lasted almost a week before slipping away.

You had spent most of that week in a haze of pain and sleeplessness, bedbound to avoid ripping yourself open again. You remember the period with the vivid colors and shadows of shock and waking nightmares.

Between the three of you, you don’t think your grubs were ever set down for more than a few moments, and with the caution of approaching dangerous territory you can admit to yourself that you are grateful that they were never alone. Your memories of the time are fragments of a whole you cannot recall.

Karkat, tiny and perfect, already noisy. The little yellow, tiny and quiet on your chest. Studying them both, like a puzzle to be worked out, what features look like Cronus’s eyes, your brows, the exact imitation of his human mother’s frown.

Cronus and Porrim, crossing the room endlessly, rocking Karkat back to sleep, or Cronus holding the yellow, carefully wrapped to keep its temperature up, crooning to it, “You’re so loved, Baby, just keep fighting.”

You think you remember him singing, soft and deep, sad and sweet, something about a ship sighting land, the crew coming home, that the wait is always worth their safe return. It’s in English, just not English as you usually hear it, but your memory of this period is fuzzy and you’ve never heard the song before or since. Perhaps it is a fragment of your stressed mind.

You remember Cronus and Porrim, feeding Karkat, or coaxing the yellow into swallowing just a little bit of the extra finely ground new grub formula.

You remember Karkat, spitting up, biting, fussy. The yellow, spitting up, vomiting, sparking, too tiny to shiver.

And you remember Cronus, cradling them one at a time against small cuts in the tender skin of his inner forearm, trying to find something the yellow can keep down, trying by force of will and love and desperation to give your children nutrients, health, weight enough that the very air didn’t steal them away. Karkat had seemed to settle a bit, the yellow had stopped vomiting, had started to swallow with less coaxing.

Soon both Cronus and Porrim had short ladders of cuts from their inner elbows down. You think it was only the night following the emergence when you had insisted on helping, made Porrim read the drug warnings because your eyes couldn’t focus, had refused further pain killers or antibiotics and waited another eternal night and day for your body to clear them out. You think it was the third night, the Monday, when you lay in the bed with one hand supporting the tiny yellow as it mouthed at a cut just below your collarbone. Then you had felt the sharp and perfect pain at the moment that it had latched its little snaggleteeth in, had suckled, like it had figured this out, like it wanted to live, like it might make it.

This is one of the few clear moments you remember of this week, like a perfectly cut crystal which will never be worn to a fuzzy memory. In time, the emergence scar will twist and heal and fade into greys, ugly, necessary. This feeding scar you will open so many times over the next few weeks and months that it becomes a circular, just slightly convex jewel tinted with your blood color. You will remember your baby’s features, but need pictures to remember how all the perfect pieces fit in a perfect whole. You will feel guilt, but you will never, NEVER forget that one moment of hope.

You remember Cronus, stroking gentle fingers down tiny grub bellies and sides, trying to stimulate premature digestive systems to move things along, cleaning the resultant messes with a look of triumph that only another new parent could understand.

And you remember Cronus, crying silently, rocking the yellow’s tiny body when it was beyond comfort.

Your beloved, flush and pale, ashen in annoyance, and sometimes, just a tad dark, is so entirely Beforan. You smear quadrants until you roll yourselves, wrap yourselves, in one another, complete. And now there’s Karkat, and you’re more complete than ever, except for that one tiny gap. The yellow is known to you only as Baby and will forever be a tiny form curled in your arms, hidden away in the family scrapbook that Cronus keeps. There’s a death certificate tucked in the pocket for Baby Ampora-Vantas, 8/20/11-8/26/11, failure to thrive.

You didn’t cry when it happened. You just tried to put one metaphorical foot in front of the other down the long dark metaphorical tunnel. Cronus is so much stronger than you. You are grateful to your human in-laws, who raised him to be unafraid of his emotions, generous. You have had many caretakers, and no parents. You remember some of them with fondness, but you don’t keep in touch. You are grateful that at least one of you has a chance of not emotionally compromising your offspring.

Now, you complete the routine of busy families everywhere. Cronus has the dayshift currently, the result of a promotion last year.

Previously he’d had a late night to early morning shift, where troll police officers are most needed for dealing with the nightlife of all species. But even after centuries, there are native humans that are uncomfortable with trolls, and humans are diurnal. And so Cronus, with his aggressively friendly and flirty college-self mellowed to a courteous good humor, is a valuable overture from the integrated police department to all the sentient communities for which it is responsible. (They aren’t kidding about Minnesota Nice. It worked its wily ways on you in college when you were looking for a fight. A few senior citizens remembering the “good old days”, decades before, when they or their ancestors were busy discriminating and protesting and legislating among their own peoples, don’t stand a chance.)

You are so proud of him, even if his human upbringing has skewed his sense of beauty. He thinks your wide hips and square hands are perfect. He also thinks that fermented mammalian secretions are a perfectly normal food group. You’re going to let the mammals have a pass on this one.

Meanwhile, Karkat is clearly an alien meant to bedevil you with mortification and adorabloodthirsty cuteness at every turn. It’s a good thing that all your Federation history classes at the local community college start at 10am or later, because despite the early start every morning, it takes several hours to get breakfast into him, off of him, and a set of clean clothes onto him, though you wouldn’t trade your time with him for anything.

Clearly whoever coined the term wriggler was peering into the future and laughing at you. You hope they get a good earful of the language he spews and choke on it. You have no idea where he gets it, but you hope the other parents don’t blame you when their precious bundles come home and announce that something’s so awesome it’s sthitf*ck!

You take him for a run through the park and drop him off at daycare, still panting, with a packed lunch and a seahorse sippy-cup of water. This is the only mercy you can offer the poor daycare workers and you know that in the long run it’s improving his stamina faster than yours.

You vow to get back into tai chi or yoga or swimming or something, but aren’t sure when it will happen. Between resuming your classes and Karkat, you don’t have much time free of responsibility and you don’t want to waste Karkat’s wrigglerhood. Clearly, like an over-spawned caterpillar-salmon infected with cuckoo-wasps of your own making, it is your duty to raise your child even if it means he gets most of his exercise beating you at everything. This is the natural order of evolution, right?

You head off to your much calmer (sometimes sleeping) community college students, secure in the knowledge that Karkat will spend the day imposing his will on the other larval lambkins, terrorizing the caretakers, and still be twice as happy to see you come pick him up as they are to see him go. It’s a mysterious alchemy but your spawn is exceedingly popular. The daycare workers are clearly all saints.

He calls you KankerDad, but you know it is a term of affection. He calls Cronus, CrowMom, and you choose to laugh instead of be resentful. (Last week, Cronus grabbed the both of you during the early morning ambush, pulled your shirt up and shoved Karkat up it: “Hey, kid, this here set of formerly tight abs is the one you chewed your way out of, have some respect.” Karkat managed to kick him in the chin. Six months since the last incident report, and that restraining a troll in a psychotic breakdown from hurting herself, only to break his streak when kicked bloody by a toddler. You are positive that Phil’s son doesn’t do this.)

Karkat clearly takes after the Alternian side of his genetics, not that you know much about his third genetic donor, besides the fact that the yellow came up clean on the gene and STD scans.

Tall and wiry, by turns sarcastic and quiet, still sporting the scars of an Empire-style helm’s column, the free yellow was listed under a set of numbers on a website for one night stands for genetic donors and/or bucket partners. You still don’t know his name, but he provided the both of you with what you needed. He comes through the Sol system every six months or so and had visited twice to see Karkat.

When you saw him for the first time after that one night of the caliginous activity that had kick-started your body into carrying, you had seen a ghost of what Baby might have been, four tiny horn buds grown to decent blades, fragility replaced by wiry strength and the inaudible hum of psionics.

You had still been sore months after the emergence, core still knitting itself back together, cravings for raw grade meats still making a mockery of your carefully budgeted grocery shopping during your two semester leave of absence from teaching. You would drive to the tiny specialty butcher or fishmarket a town over and return home to cut the meat, and sometimes fish, thin enough to be almost translucent, dip it into your boiling hot Lapsang souchong tea just long enough to heat and firm it. You could consume a pound of it at a time, and only with great restraint would it last more than a day. Cronus still buys it for you, an expense you can’t justify making yourself. It smells like smoke and tastes mostly raw and perfect.

In the kitchen, mere feet from the site of one of your worse moments, the yellow had accepted tea and thin slices of raw beef, and mostly just stared at you and at Cronus and at Karkat.

At the first of these meetings, Karkat had been a grub still, had consumed his share of the beef, spilled your tea, wee’d on the table, and fallen asleep on you as Cronus laughed and cleaned up. This had earned a sharp-toothed smile from your guest, and he had taken his leave as if he had found what he came for.

At the second meeting, a few months ago, Karkat had proclaimed him “Mista Sthick” and insisted Mister Stick help him color in his “Children’s Guide to Earthen Weather Phenomena”, and told him that he did it all wrong. “You has to use ALL THE COLORS!”

Indoor voice is a concept you despair of instilling in your precocious spawn, and so you had just let out a soft sigh of relief that it wasn’t “Mister Stick-Up-the-Ass”. You don’t know where Karkat gets it, but once he starts to make the connections, you dread the day when he discovers what sexual profanity means and starts to get creative. You figure you have about two years of safety left, and then kindergarten will have no idea what hit it.

Previously, the range of Mister Stick’s expressions has included smirking and taunting you into a caliginous passion the likes of which you’ve never experienced, nor thought you wanted to. He has also sat at your kitchen table and stared like facial expressions are optional, not surprising from someone who was a helm under the Empire, but still, eerie. Karkat frowns like the world is out to disappoint him. This is evidently sufficient to make Mister Stick smile.

You are relieved that you completed your PhD in a history field instead of pursuing the other side of your double major, psychology, because trolls are every bit as crazy as humans.


	4. A conversation between two parents over the slumbering form of their precious obscenity sponge

Karkat is almost three, asleep in your bed between Cronus and you, already recharging his batteries for next dawn’s ambush. You are both curled around him. You are curling a finger in his wriggler-fine hair, savoring a few moments when he is still and quiet and very clearly still breathing, before one of you musters up the energy to tuck him in his own bed. Cronus has an elbow planted on your ribs, hand dangling to pet one of Karkat’s tiny horns. They’re still not showing any sign of outgrowing yours.

You can feel Cronus’s contented rumble. He’s humming a lullaby of some sort, human wrigglerhood a sort of armor of such resources.

Karkat twists, kicks you almost in the bone bulge, headbutts Cronus in the chest. You are getting faster in self-defense, you shift and catch the blow on the meat of your pelvic girdle instead, relieved that it isn’t painful, a novel experience even now. Cronus just grunts a bit and smiles, delighted. Karkat, still asleep, bites into his shirt and shakes it.

“Hey, Chief?”

“Hmm?”

“You ever think about getting Karkat some sibs?” Cronus has five of his own, three human, a selkie, and Porrim, all raised on their parents’ farm in Minnesota, an hour from Duluth. His human parents both have siblings, all of whom appear to have offspring and mates and ancient in-laws or tiny grandspawn of their own. You have extensive diagrams and flash cards that you obsessively study before every reunion and still live in fear that you will mix up Joan and Jan and Yvonne and Sven and Ivan and Eric and Erin and Aaron.

They all dote on Karkat, the first grandchild for this branch, and he has already extended his domain to include them. If you lived any closer, if Karkat expressed any interest, you suspect he might get a pony for his birthday, a human symbol for utterly spoiling a child rotten.

As it is, you get semi-regular visitors, “just dropping by” every time someone in the family is in the vicinity of Chicago. Your town is not actually very close to Chicago, Anne’s weekly commute is at least 90 minutes each way, but Cronus’s family is huge and very, very friendly, and you now have a stack of children’s activity and picture books, toys and other mementos of their visits, and a refrigerator covered in photos and letters.

At least once a month, Karkat holds court via webcam for Cronus’s family on the farm. You already know that his report cards will be filled with “shows leadership potential” and polite reminders about sharing.

It’s a seven hour plus drive from the Duluth area, but your mother-in-law still showed up at 9am on the Saturday of Karkat’s first wriggling day (not quite his second birthday) with a cooler full of venison casserole, gravlax, and jello salad, wielding her personal rosette iron like a kitchen queen’s scepter.

You had just found out that morning that according to the obscure rules of the daycare community of a small town, you were supposed to throw a party. You had been ready to throw something alright. Debbie is clearly an angel and anyone who doesn’t think venison casserole, gravlax, and jello are appropriate foods for a mob of toddlers has clearly never been in the midst of a feeding frenzy of anklebiters. You have a picture of Karkat sitting in the demolished jello salad bowl, and you consider it future insurance against the teenage years.

You’ve been quiet too long.

“Hey, Chief? I ever tell you how utterly badass you are?” You both sneak a reflexive glace at your little obscenity sponge and sigh in relief. He’s worried a hole through Cronus’s shirt and is drooling, fast asleep.

When you look up, he continues.

“When you messaged Egbert and we got back in, like, four minutes, you were already doing what needed to be done. And I saw the knife, and the blood and everything, and I wasn’t sure that I coulda done the same. Like, sometimes when I need to do something a bit rough I just think of you and know that I can because I don’t want to be less than worthy of you both. Karkat’s perfect, because he’s so much like you.”

Your breath catches. Your mate is an utter sap and you are so, so lucky.

“You mean a short, rude tyrant?”

“You see what’s necessary and you just do it.”

The two of you just breathe for a bit, heads together. Karkat manages a fast little combo of knee, back kick, flip, head-butt, and it’s your turn to grunt. You roll to cradle his perfect wriggler weight, somehow still amazed that this once fit inside of you. Karkat mouths at your shirt over your feeding scar, snuffles and sighs, body completely relaxing now, breathing slow and deep. Cronus pulls you both closer, whispers in your ear, like he couldn’t manage to say it to your face.

“Baby wasn’t moving. Karkat pushed him out, didn’t scoot when he had the chance, didn’t resist after. Was almost a month early. Karkat coulda used the rest a the term, but Baby wouldn’ta made it, the cord and caul both had thin spots. Wasn’t your fault. Wasn’t anyone’s.”

You catch your breath and try not to cry. You hadn’t wanted to talk about Baby, not After. Cronus had needed to talk and you had leaned against him and wouldn’t reply. He had told you that you were brave and wonderful and all sorts of lies.

You had wondered if you had done something wrong, had struck too early, had waited too long, hadn’t gotten the right supplements, had eaten something toxic, had been found wanting, mutant cullbait after all.

There isn’t much on internally gestated grub development and health. Most trolls are smart enough not to bother when there’s always plenty of healthy Beforan Mothergrub-produced grubs, always some left even if lusii are present to choose. And there will always be more unfortunate Alternian grubs sold or smuggled across the distant space borders of the Federation.

There are no publically available statistics regarding either Beforian or Alternian infant mortality. None.

It’s possible that every egg hatches, that every grub pupates. It’s also possible that one in ten don’t make it, or five in ten, or worse. Grubs don’t get names, or signs, or so much as a record, until they are old enough to be offered out on Beforus. You suspect that Alternia is no better and likely far, far worse.

Internally gestated grubs statistics are even less known. You only know as much as you do from a few forums, a few short articles here and there, and, of course, the cautionary urban legends every troll knows about not being the bucket for both matesprit and kismesis, no matter what your kinks are. You are sailing almost uncharted waters and it is no surprise that you have failed. It doesn’t feel any less devastating to know this.

Maybe it’s selfish to not adopt, maybe it’s selfish to try to reproduce your uncertain genetics. But you love Karkat with a deep-seated certainty that you know would outlast even your love for Cronus, and that an ocean so wide you cannot fathom. You already know you would die for either of them. The thought of anyone hurting Karkat, suggesting that he doesn’t deserve to exist, ignites an ember of certainty in you that you would kill to protect your child.

“Ya think tha grubs tha youn' can lovve?” It’s in Cronus’s softest voice, his odd and beautiful accent only evident when stressed or utterly secure. You think that this is the worst and best of both.

You are crying, despite yourself, one hand cradling the back of Karkat’s head, the other holding Cronus’s head to the top of yours, uncomfortable for both of you, necessary so that you can cry into him without him seeing in the dim light spilling from the hallway nightlight. Your belly trembles with suppressed sobs, and now Karkat thrashes in his perpetual sleepfighting. Cronus stretches one broad hand over Karkat’s back, rubs until he settles, until you settle. His shirt is covered in your tears and snot, and Karkat’s drool. The two of you are exactly alike.

“Hey, Chief. Think the next grub might need to stomp its little grub legs over some new territory? Fair’s fair, and Karkat’s not likely to share much else just yet. And my parental leave kicks in a bit more than the college’s.”

“I’m not sure we can keep up with Karkat as he is. You think we can manage another?”

“Positive. And you know Karkat would love and terrorize and protect ‘em. And we got plenty of grubsitting volunteers, despite Karkat’s best efforts.”

“What about adoption?”

“I got nothing against it, but I gotta ask, I’m not good enough for you?” It’s said in a tone of good humor and utterly avoids the very valid point that you yourself might have been more well-adjusted if you too had been adopted instead of endlessly farmed out to well-meaning foster homes.

“Fishing for compliments?” you retort, and the fake bickering is just enough to let you make eye contact.

He wiggles an eyebrow, the shadow of the sometimes (usually) lewd college student you first met.

You sigh. “I just don’t want to hurt you.”

“That’s life. Don’t have forevva. Have to make a list and check it twice, gonna find out who’s naughty or nice…”

“It’s July.”

“S’okay. Not a list for Santa.” There’s mirth suppressed in his rumble.

“What kind of list?” You have a sinking suspicion you already know.

“Bucket list!” Still soft but it’s a whisper-shout.

You groan but laugh, shove at his muscled weight a bit until he stops laughing. You think you’d like to see him round with your grub, would love the soft susurrus of grublegs on carpet again, their pitter-patter-slup on the linoleum, playing peekaboo with someone who has no inkling of object permanence, the perpetual new discovery of it. You can imagine a family like Cronus’s, adopted and biological and complete.

Karkat kicks you in the bladder, aim ever unerring, and the uncompromising grip of nature calls. You scoot over and swing your legs over the edge of the bed, gather him up with an arm under his bottom, one behind his back. You shift him over a hip and Cronus makes a soft noise of appreciation, always up for admiring your “childbearing hips” regardless of how it really doesn’t apply. You might pause for perhaps a second longer than necessary to give him a good view, might sway just a tiny bit more than necessary. You walk across the hallway, tuck Karkat in with a half of a grubgrade lab-grown sopor patch on an inner elbow, brush a kiss over one still velvety horn, close the door.

In your bedroom, you close the door again, stop in the bathroom to empty your much abused bladder, wash your face, brush your teeth. Cronus is still awake, still appreciative, when you get back to bed. You cross the space Karkat recently took up, slide close, grind once.

“You up for some practice?”

“Darlin’, you’re already perfect, but me, I think I need some practice.”

It’s a good thing neither of you have work tomorrow.

*

In the late morning of the next day, Karkat fed and glued to the TV for his 30 allotted minutes of daily telemelodrama, (further proof that he is alien spawn: Karkat still doesn’t talk in complete sentences all the time, but he’s already tracking daytime soap opera plots with the fervency of a religious zealot), your lover will hold you and confess, “It feels wrong to adopt just yet. Like, Baby didn’t last long, but had a right to live, a right to have a chance, and, I know it’s stupid, but I just want to give ‘em one more chance. If ‘Mister Stick’ isn’t willing, then that’s that, but it feels wrong to not try.”

You know that it’s not logical. How could any other grub be Karkat? If, and your heart aches at the very thought, if Baby had survived and Karkat had not, if Karkat had been ‘Baby’ and you now cradled a precious gold-blooded child to you, instead of Karkat’s warm weight, how could any successive grub, no matter how dear, replace what Karkat would have been? And yet, what Cronus said sounds right in a way that has nothing to do with logic.


	5. Porn in support of plot

When Karkat is four and leaves daycare for preschool, you find yourself coordinating even more with Anne and Phil. Every school morning, Phil pulls up in the patrol car and you exchange your impeccably outfitted spouse for a still sleepy four year old in PJs.

Karkat already knows John from daycare, and repeated visits with Anne and Rosie. (Karkat regards Rosie with admiration and all the studious and hungry concentration a four year old can manage. You’re not sure if he wants to learn from her or if maybe he plans to just absorb her impressive vocabulary by gnawing on her until he wins. Your grub is articulate in both verbal and body language. Regretfully, this still includes a great deal of biting when all other methods have failed.)

Karkat and John have probably teethed on each other, a thought that makes you wince considering John is a least a half year younger, human babies are fragile, and he was starting the race with a distinctive handicap in the armament department.

Karkat still initially treated John with great suspicion at the encroachment into his territory, but has since commandeered him for preschooler shenanigans. It’s easier to get them both ready for preschool now that they compete to be ready first. John calls you KankerDad. You will clearly never be known as anything else to any of Karkat’s friends. You think you may be resigned.

*

After completely reasonable discussion and logical debate – you totally didn’t skree, not in the least, _shut up, Cronus_ , you sent a message to the third biological contributor to your precious spawn, and waited. He set the time for his next trip through, you set your schedules to match up for a few days and the three of you meet up in a hotel in the heavily troll district of Chicago.

The desk clerk gave you a wink and thumbs up when you checked in, told you that your ‘roommate’ was already here. The two of you took the elevator to the second floor with one little rolling suitcase and were reminded why she winked when the door opened before you could swipe your card.

You had forgotten how easy it was to hate the yellow. He is still sarcastic and arrogant, stoicism now set aside. You don’t know what he gets out of this, there have to be easier ways to find one-night hate-stands, but you aren’t stupid enough to question him when he still hasn’t offered a name. His screens still come up clean. He gifted you Karkat, and Baby. You don’t need to dig for details.

It’s strange to watch him provoke Cronus until your sweet Beforan lover snaps, strange to see that infuriating smirk from just outside its focus, bizarre beyond words to see your mellow love react and lunge as if the yellow is truly a threat.

They grapple, seadweller strength versus helmgrade psionics, and it is no surprise that the yellow dominates him, no surprise that your lover never stops fighting, even when they switch to outright fucking. You are not jealous of their attention, but you do grow very interested. You have never found porn to be of interest, but this, this private, incidental show between your mate and a caliginous fling, this is affecting you so that you dig your claw tips into the arms of the chair, spine straight. You feel predatory and unashamed of it.

You watch them finish their first round, your lover stretched out face up on the bed, hands bound down with the helmsman’s power, shoulders to heels a tense lifted arc of powerful muscles, all devoted to staying as close as possible to the other participant, face a mask of anger and need.

You feel a bit protective but know that he is content to be there, as confusing as it sounds. Perhaps trolls truly do need caliginous relationships. He looked at you once, but he did not call for you, did not tell the yellow to stop.

The yellow outwaits Cronus, waits for him to spill across the sheets before he fills him with his own spill, and you know that in their game, round one has gone to your familiar stranger. The two of them relax, marginally, Cronus lowering himself to the bed, the yellow riding him down, still embedded.

You can hear them exchanging little barbs now, the yellow accenting his with little thrusts. He still hasn’t released Cronus’s hands. He shows no sign of withdrawing, which, for your purposes, is all to the furthering of your cause. You can no longer resist, and join them on the bed, slowly climb behind the yellow, giving him time to object. He doesn’t.

You lean past him to cradle Cronus’s face, trace one elegant earfin. Cronus sighs, face now set in the familiar lines of fondness. The yellow thrusts a bit and his face transforms as he snarls. It’s not pain. It’s not _precisely_ sexual, or rather, it's more than that alone. Cronus is more _human_ than you, and finding someone who can surpass his strength and inspire rivalry and not panic… well, this is the closest he’s ever come to experiencing kismesissitude. You can see him whipsawing between red and black lusts, can smell both sets of pheromones. No doubt both sets of hormones are storming his gates, even as the yellow leans down and nips his other earfin. You discussed this, and both suspect that it can only help.

When the yellow withdraws, it’s obvious that their efforts have managed to induce Cronus's seedflap to draw in the contribution, only a bit of yellow joins the violet on the sheets. The yellow flicks a finger and a few sparks up one ladder of opercula, tells him, “As good as you look on your back, I want to see you on your knees.”

You take this as your cue to return to the chair, and you were wise to do so, because while Cronus’s first reaction was to snarl, his next was to lunge. They go at each other again, across the bed, slamming into a wall, flinging each other about. The chair where you sit is the only piece of furniture besides the bed and the phone on the wall. The room was clean when you got here but the scarcity of furniture makes it obvious that this isn’t the first time it’s entertained a caliginous hookup. They manage not to be so entwined in one another that they upset your perch. You are the polite spectator in a bubble. It is you. You couldn’t pay to get a show this hot.

The yellow is decorated with thin dripping claw lines by the time he pins Cronus to the bed again, one psionics-assisted arm over your lover’s hands, the other at the nape of his neck, palm over the knobs of spine, fingers wrapped so that sharp talons threaten delicate neck opercula. You have licked and nibbled and sucked those little delicate flexible flaps, so, so gently. Evidently that’s not the only way to rev Cronus’s engine, because the tickle of claws makes him shiver, earfins flicking in definite interest.

The yellow teases him until he’s almost sobbing for it, works him over with touch, and taunts, and psionics, until violet splashes on the bed a second time before he deigns to mount your lover fully. The second round takes much, much longer. The yellow takes his time working to a second climax, takes his time while Cronus’s body pulls in as much slurry as it can handle.

You take two water bottles from your bag and join them on the bed again at that point, the two of them still connected, Cronus’s arms, now free, drawn back a bit to brace himself. You study his face and know that he is just as distracted by the sensation of his seedflap processing the slurry in little sips as he is by the yellow’s bulge. You brush his hair back and run a hand down his spine, circle to feel the slightest curve to his belly. It’s probably just your imagination, he has abdominal muscles you never did. Then again, you know exactly how much sheer volume it felt like to take the yellow’s slurry twice.

You look up and find that the yellow is studying you back.

“ _Come_ here often?” he asks, and snickers, “eheheheheh”, snorts, shakes Cronus with it. He is _so_ easy to hate.

Cronus lifts his head and chuckles, always ready to appreciate a dirty pun. The yellow bumps forward and your lover moans and drops his head again. You reply.

“You would be aware of precisely how often as it has only been in your company. And you, do you _come_ here often?”

“Nah. You two are the exception. Turned down plenty before, haven’t bothered since. You’re both _insufferable_.”

He snickers again, and this is said in the tone of an inside joke, and you make yourself take a breath to calm yourself before you get angry that he’s laughing at a joke unshared. He is so, _so_ easy to hate.

He runs a hand down the laddered ab muscles you’ve just assessed, nudges up a few more times, almost gently. Cronus groans again, spine and hips managing to dip and spread even further.

“How’s mini-Red?”

You have discussed your spawn in a variety of circumstances, several quite embarrassing, in a variety of states of anointed with unfortunate body fluids: spit, mucus, vomit, pee, poop. This is perhaps a bit surreal, but childrearing has evidently prepared you to engage in polite discourse with the not-quite stranger who is the third-biological contributor to the subject at hand, while he is still bulge-deep in your matesprit, the other parent of your precocious, rude, adorable spawn.

“Healthy. Demanding. He is much as when you saw him last year, though his sentences are much longer now. He is still strangely obsessed with the love lives of fictional characters. He bosses other people around and gets away with it more than he should. But he isn’t cruel, not the way children can be before they learn empathy. We are very grateful for him.”

The yellow gives one last little nudge and seems satisfied, withdraws slowly, with only a few drops of yellow going to waste. He helps Cronus lever himself back up and turn over. Your lover looks somewhere between sleepy and electrified, the hormone dump still spinning his pupils wide. You help him prop himself against you, toss one water bottle to the yellow, and crack the other for Cronus.

“Good.”

You glance back at the yellow and he leans forward just far enough to pat Cronus’s abs, withdraws before Cronus has a chance to bat him off.

“Maybe a little fishy princeling this time?” He cackles a bit at Cronus’s frown. Your lover is proud to work. He loves his job. Americans might be obsessed with foreign royalty, but they aren’t big on kowtowing to it on their own land. You wonder if the yellow has ever spent enough time on Earth to understand why that is insulting, or if it is strictly intended as an Alternian insult.

Cronus, head still leaning into you, makes his first intelligible contribution. “Maybe another yellow this time.” His voice is not quite steady, exhausted, a bit wistful.

“Another?” The yellow’s eyes are sharp, for all that they don’t precisely have visible pupils.

“Another,” you confirm and hesitate. You don’t know his motivations, but now that he suspects, he deserves to know. You don’t expect him to mourn. You hope he knows limits to his cruelty.

“We are hoping for an uneventful gestation and emergence, with one or more healthy grubs. Karkat… Karkat emerged a month early when his clutchmate was in distress. Baby… We only had Baby for a few days.”

“And you want a little pet psionic of your own?” His voice is sharp and you can imagine that on Alternia, this would not be so offensive a question, for all that it burns in you until you want to strangle him, want to tell him that you would give anything but Karkat or Cronus, anything, to have Baby, alive, and healthy, and running you ragged.

“No.” This you find yourself snarling with your tensed matesprit. You force yourself to settle, run a hand through Cronus’s hair until he leans back again. You breathe together and the yellow waits, silent, watching, maybe judging.

“Perhaps it is foolish, but it felt like giving up on Baby to not try again. If it doesn’t take, well, we’ll determine what to do then.” You confess this for the both of you and you wait.

“Ehheheheheh,” he snickers, and you want to punch him. “ _That’s_ unlikely to be a problem. I bred plenty of seadwellers at helm, the Empire has a program to go with their ongoing pogrom, Red. It’s what makes you both so very hate-able, the mild-mannered, humane seadweller and the human-mannered, heretical red blindly horns-over-heels for one another. Not sure if you’re just pretending to be all human-like or if you’re really both such shadows of actually Alternians, but I haven’t found any pitch satisfaction in Beforans either.”

He is moving off the bed as he casually insults you and gives you a window into yet another terrible facet of Alternia. He dumps the rest of his water down his front and uses the sheet to scrub and dry. He neatly nips back into his flightsuit and boots.

“You may call me Mituna. I will be back on the usual schedule to see what the seadweller manages to cultivate.”

He flicks his keycard from a pocket onto the chair and strides from the room, still smelling of sex, confident, infuriating. The practical part of you is relieved he’s leaving, sure he’s done his part. It’s best he leave before there are any non-negotiated hostilities. There’s a very impractical part of you that wants to slug him in the teeth, tackle him, pin him to Cronus and take him apart.

You clench your hands and teeth, one hand on Cronus’s shoulder, your knuckles white with it. The door locks behind Mituna, leaving you to tend to your beloved until you are both ready to finish. Cronus covers your hand on his shoulder with his own, tilts his head to catch your gaze, and rumbles out a nonverbal invitation, _yes that ass is fine, but perhaps you might peruse mine instead?_ Humorous. Sincere. You build worlds and walls with words. Cronus doesn’t even need words to prove he understands you, supports you, loves you. You breathe slowly for a few minutes and focus on anything but pitch thoughts.

It’s possible that Cronus’s feelings for you are powerful enough that even without flushed coupling, his hormones will carry out the necessary stimulations and changes to create a fertilization, but with Mituna only available every six months or so, you both prefer to try to make this as sure a thing as possible.

You have the room for the night, a babysitter until tomorrow evening. Check out is eleven am. You got here at six and it’s only midnight now. You set the alarm on your phone for five-thirty, though you suspect you won’t need it after years of being primed for the AM-ambush, shut the light off and spoon Cronus in the least damp section of the bed. You can’t help but cradle him as best you can, and futilely try to feel a change under his six-pack.

In the morning it is Cronus who wakes you with gentle hands and a sweet hum in contrast to horrible morning breath. The two of you stumble to the bathroom with the conflicting grace and awkwardness of years-of-practice and away-from-home. You shower and brush teeth and tumble back into the filthy bed. It’s been so long since you’ve had a babysitter for the night, you had forgotten how nice it was to just rediscover each other.

Afterward you shower again, dress, and check out, signing off on the damage deposit without flinching. The checkout clerk is a human woman this morning and she smiles and asks you if there was anything amiss in the facilities. You shake your head without comment and return the key cards, including Mituna’s. Cronus yawns as you reach the car and you snag the keys. He falls asleep on the way home.

*

You start to get polite little inquiries by email from a Latula Pyrope. At first you don’t open them, are sure they’re spam, but the subject lines finally get so personal you can no longer abstain. A month in you open one entitled “236 days +/- until I’m an Auntie? Again? When can we visit?”.

Oh. _OH_. This appears to be Mituna’s captain, and, if she can be trusted, his matesprit, and she’s _Beforan_. You are definitely inviting them over together because you want to see if she can make him pretend to be _human-mannered_. It would be rude to interrogate his matesprit for his weaknesses, but that doesn’t mean you don’t want to watch him _squirm_. She’s included their next two scheduled passes through Sol. You check with Cronus and find that your own mate is in perfect mental lockstep with you on this. You dash off a short but agonizingly overthought reply, combining an apology for its tardiness, with confirmation of Cronus’s health, with a welcome to visit invitation. They’re next due through in a bit under five months, six months even from Mituna’s last visit.

Maybe you’ll introduce her to Porrim.


	6. Life Continues

The bedroom door crashing open is the only warning you get before, thump, thump, whomp, Karkat launches himself onto your bed. You open your mouth to remind him once again to be careful, but you shut it when you see that his landing on you hasn’t even jostled Cronus, just your much abused self. You wrap an arm around his waist, ready to pull him back if he launches himself further forward.

He stares at Cronus, or rather the bulge of his belly, and absentmindedly chews on his sleep shirt.

“Are they here yet?”

“Not yet.”

“What’s taking so long?”

This has become the new morning ritual since Cronus got too big to comfortably drive to work, already constricted to desk duties. You no longer try to gently guide Karkat to the idea that there might not be two grubs in there. He’s already named them, though sometimes he changes his mind. You just have to wait, and hope.

Phil, formerly Senior Trooper Egbert, now distinctly on first name basis, is a godsend. Every morning at 6am he drops off John and any new files, picks up any hardcopies of the work Cronus finished the previous day, and remains a link to sanity for your normally active lover, now confined to the orbit of the house and occasional errand.

Cronus has been picking away at the cold case files from the primitive computing days, entering data, ID’ing evidence that could be processed with newer techniques, if it’s still available. Phil, already assigned a new partner for patrols, has spent a lot of his free time shuffling through the oldest evidence lockers in this county and several surrounding ones for what may or may not still exist. All too often, the cases are a litany of sad circumstances, and, you see how it cuts him to the quick, sometimes failings within the department. You don’t have to know any of the details, you can read it all in his face, and the drop and twitch and flare of his earfins.

The rookie, one Dirk Strider, appears to have majored in expressionless sarcasm, but having entered the inexorable orbit of Phil, Anne, and Cronus’s good-natured steering, is clearly outmatched, and the Strider schedule has been realigned to march in step with his partner’s.

This has meant that you now have three small whirlwinds to supervise and deliver to kindergarten in the morning, but you find yourself content with this. Dirk’s little brother, or son, or whatever technical human genetic relationship they share, is a sweet and sensitive child. Davey’s just about John’s age and sometimes Karkat gets protective, or possessive, if he thinks John’s monopolizing Davey, or pushing him around too much.

Davey’s eyes are as red as yours and he wears a little pair of dark mirrored sunglasses like Dirk, a rather hilarious juxtaposition of a symbol of Dirk’s adult authority on top of a five year old’s still padded features. Davey doesn’t talk much yet, and sometimes he retreats from Karkat and John’s exuberance to you or to Cronus. As long as there are no other little witnesses at the time, you call him your cuddlebug and he doesn’t object, just rests his head on your shoulder. You savor these moments as you know you won’t be able to lift any of them in a few short years, and that long before that, they will likely object.

Davey’s quiet nature reminds you a bit of Rosie’s self-possession, like he’s waiting and watching, and when he’s ready, he might just surprise everyone with what he has to say. Rosie, now eight, speaks in complex sentences with needlessly polysyllabic words out of the sheer joy of playing with language and verbally sparring with adults. You don’t blame Davey that he doesn’t want to bring his smart five year old’s vocabulary to bear against her genius eight year old’s and be demolished. Until Rosie learns a bit more compassion, it’s like bringing a sword to a machine gun fight.

Rosie’s technically in fourth grade but receives fifth and sixth grade supplemental work. Last year she commuted with Anne to Chicago and went to a specialized school for the four days a week Anne taught, both staying in their tiny campus apartment and coming home for the other three days a week. Now Anne’s three days in Chicago and four here and everyone seems much less stressed. Rosie stays with their neighbor in the mornings and walks to school with Ms. Paint and her Alternian-hatched daughter Kanaya. The girls are as thick as thieves and Kanaya is not in the least intimidated by Rosie.

You wonder how Dirk managed, manages, without a partner to help care for Davey, when between the two of you, Karkat regularly managed to exhaust Cronus and you both as a grub and younger wriggler.

By some miracle of scheduling this semester, Anne can cover Monday and Friday school pickups, you can cover Tuesday and Thursday, and Phil and Dirk have Wednesdays clear at the moment. Cronus has bid a rueful adieu to his foxy vintage Triumph, and the proceeds have helped fund a second vehicle, a secondhand full-size van with seating for eight to eleven. Anne has the second set of keys. It feels like driving a boat and, sitting in your driveway, is ridiculously oversized in comparison to your one-story Arts and Crafts bungalow with its modest two bedrooms, family room, kitchen, and, thankfully, two bathrooms. When you pull up at the grade school among the other buses and parents, with the windows down you can hear your vehicle get announced just like the buses: “Egbert-Lalonde-Vantas-Ampora-Strider, ELVAS riders are dismissed. Repeat, El-vis is leav-ing the build-ing”. Sometimes there’s a bit of further crooning into the PA system if there’s no bus queued up close behind you. Rufioh moonlights in Chicago on weekends as an impersonator and he thinks he has a sense of humor. You are hoping he doesn’t give Cronus ideas, as your spouse has a good voice but doesn’t need any encouragement for further abuse of his guitar.

Your lover isn’t stupid, is usually more patient than you with belligerent citizens and needlessly complicated bureaucracy, and he’s found what appears to be a vocation within the reduced horizons of his reduced mobility.

He’s applied for grants and this week alone you know that Phil has shipped out a dozen untested rape kits for testing now that the grants have started to come through. It’s the type of project that doesn’t have a happy ending, but Cronus is steadfast at it although initially he mostly stumbled into it. He can’t discuss cases, saves his calls for when you’re all out, but he wears his college rugby expression when he reads, the one that looks like a smile but is really a threat. You know that he’s made a promise to himself now and he won’t back down. You mate is a knight in maternity jeans. You did not think you could grow to love him even more.

When he gets frustrated he takes a break and walks, or tends the garden he started in place of the tiny strip of grass between the porch and sidewalk. Just after Karkat was born, just after you lost Baby, he didn’t want to leave you alone, but needed an outlet. He threw his strength against something that couldn’t be hurt and it is just another way in which he amazes you that his efforts wrung such results from the earth, digging, and chopping, and mixing, and planting different shades of brown and scraps of green into the cooling earth of September and October. You briefly had a cactus in grade school but that is the extent of your understanding of this process. You can’t remember if it died or the two of you, alike in prickliness, were shuffled off in different directions during one of your reassignments to another home.

Technically your house so close to the center of town is not zoned for so much as a tomato but he has interspersed the flowers and vegetables and herbs so that the nasturtiums and green beans and cherry tomatoes are sharing stakes and the zucchini is hiding under a patch of feathery dill and the upright stalks of several sunflowers. No one has objected, and he regularly shares when neighbors visit so that your whole neighborhood is probably complicit in the consumption of illegally grown produce.

There are climbing rosebushes in red and pink and white and yellow and orange, all assaulting the future integrity of your porch, but providing shade and an almost hypnotic peppery sweetness to the air.

There are tiny trees of rosemary plants, and paintbrush bursts of lavender plants, fuzzy lambs ears and not quite as fuzzy sage plants, all lining the ten foot walkway to the porch.

There are the purple starburst chive flowers and a flock of the stately spears of iris in purples and whites and an almost ridiculous number of blues and oranges and peaches and browns and even blacks, in an escalating number of ridiculous ruffles, all along the picket fence.

He had looked at it all and wistfully noted that it would look better with chickens, or maybe a beehive. You had put your foot down at that, even if the neighbors probably wouldn’t have squealed on him, already complicit in his agricultural dreamings. Next door, Mrs. Harley, (call me Jade, dear), has her own garden now, mostly plants Cronus deemed in need of dividing, and she regularly bakes cookies and calls you all “Dear” while interrogating Cronus on gun safety with a child in the house or pulling out tidbits of obscure anecdotes regarding local history. It still feels surreal, but you are not above staying in the good graces of any potential emergency child-sitter. She usually travels in the fall and winter and you keep an eye on her place while she’s gone.

In the spring, the city-owned strip of grass between the curb and sidewalk is a riot of daffodils in every shade of yellow. They are the first flowers to bloom in your yard, and the first to wither and go back to sleep

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (When Cronus grieves, he bares and buries his feelings, because you can take the boy off the farm but you can't take the farm from the boy.)


	7. Two Educational Institutions, Perhaps Unalike In Dignity...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "There is something hard and sharp and triumphant in you that thinks of the Alternian Empire and wants to hurt and hurt and hurt it. But you now know, in a visceral and no longer just intellectual way, that the Empire’s own worst enemy is itself. It tossed this young gem, inculcated in the most modern of Alternian bioware techniques, like he was so much trash. Horuss, and the Federation, will both be the better off for its stupidity."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tag: underaged rape. This chapter discusses the past rape of a newly introduced character.

There was a time when students sleeping in your classes would have made you angry. There was a time before that when the strongest thing you felt was usually anger. Some combination of Cronus, and later Karkat, and maybe even the supposed wisdom of experience have mellowed you, because now students sleeping in your classes mostly makes you worry.

You teach at a community college, and while you walk to work, many of your students drive or take the bus. Most of them work part or full time, especially your evening class students. More than a few are parents and you can’t help but sympathize. You are exacting in your tests, and you will beat essay writing into your students if you must, (they will thank you for it), but you are generous with your notes and syllabus, the materials you post online. You also hold regular office hours, and by appointment, and your appointments are often invitations, issued to a student who turned in substandard work or nodded off in class. If they are sleeping in class, they probably need it. That doesn’t mean you have to ignore it.

In this manner, over the past few years you have managed to accidently start a collection of students to whom you are some combination of mentor, tutor, and/or extra lusus. Your office is tiny but with some creative shelving and hinged tables in place of the desk, Cronus had managed to help you muscle in a convertible futon early in your gestation. Since your return to teaching, it has supported you in the occasional nap, but mostly it has seen a stream of visitors in need of someone to talk to, or a quiet corner to grab some shut eye.

Horuss Zahhak is fresh off an Alternian trade shipment and two months into the semester you suddenly have a pretty good idea of numerous things you’d prefer not to know. He’s six feet plus at the crown and muscled enough that he had you fooled right along with the administration. He wears dark glasses even indoors so you don’t catch on until your evening intro level survey course lets out one Wednesday night and everyone files out except the rumpled pile of clothing in the back corner.

You shut the door and cross to him, clear your throat with the particular rumble threat of “Attention!” from two seats away. The dismissal rush hadn’t woken him, but touching, or being touched by, a strange troll is a pretty clear statement of threat in Alternian terms.

He slams upright and his glasses slip, showing blue eyes still ringed in the outer edge with wriggler gray, and the dark bruises of sleeplessness. You read up on the very basics of all your students, even for the massive survey courses, and you are better at details than names. He’s a first year and his records show an independent garage as his emergency contact. His records also state he’s 18 but with a good look at his eyes you will eat every damn shard of his glasses if he’s a day older than sixteen.

His English is usually precise but he’s still muzzy and he’s apologizing in Alternian, shrinking from you like he’s afraid you’ll cull him. You get a closer look at his mismatched, oversized clothes, the crazed lenses of his sunglasses. He always sits in the back, keeps a distance, and from here he smells like thrift shop clothing disinfectant, the pink pump soap in institution restrooms, old sweat. At 18 and fresh from Alternia, he wouldn’t have a foster home or an already established support system. At 16, working his way through community college with a job at a garage two towns over, something in you wants to take him home and feed him, sit on him until he sleeps. Among humans this might be kind or foolish, among Beforans acceptable, among Alternians, terribly forward, and you in a position of power over him.

“Mr. Zahhak. Do you have anywhere else you need to be tonight?”

He shakes his head, eyes wide, teeth clenched, like he’s sure you’re determining how much time you have to hide his body.

“Do you have a ride home?”

He shakes his head again, and ducks his head and you don’t know if the negative refers to the idea that he would have someone to help or to the existence of a place he can call home.

“Mr. Zahhak. There is a reclining sleeping plane in my office. You will follow me there and make use of it tonight while I go home. We will also discuss your schedule as you are clearly in need of some organizational assistance.”

You chivvy him off to your office, and hand him sheets and a blanket, point at the futon, set up one of the two “TV” tables, and dig out the electric teapot, the mugs, the tea and sugar, a plate, a packet of crackers, a few granola bars, a can of sardines, a few pull-tab cans and a spoon, a few water bottles, everything you've squirrelled away for long days or student emergencies. You tap out a quick message to Cronus that you expect to be quite late.

You make the tea, a blend of Beforan bloodroot and earth chamomile and ginger, pour for the two of you and gesture at the small pile of odds and ends on the table. He is seated on the bed, you on your chair, the table between you, a slight psychological barrier between your threat as an authority figure and his vulnerability seated on an object many Alternians would consider sexual. It can’t be helped. There is no other seating in your office.

“Please, help yourself,” and you take a granola bar to try to convince him. He hesitates but starts in on one, and soon consumes all but the sardines, finishes his tea, and drains a water bottle. You stay as silently as you can, gaze politely examining the glaze pattern on your mug, a gift of another one of your regulars last year, now graduated, but still an occasional visitor.

From the corner of you eye you can see him move and his posture makes your suspicion more certain. He finishes and toys with a wrapper. You look up and slide a spare key across the little table.

“This is one of four keys to this room. I have one, my spouse has one, and there is off course a master key that allows the custodian access everywhere on campus. The custodian comes every Friday afternoon, but otherwise the room is locked outside of when I am here for my regular posted office hours and those by appointment. There is a biological waste disposal room two doors away. There are wash showers two floors down in the gym locker-room with locking stalls. I’d like you to get some sleep here tonight. I’d also like to ask you some questions and I want you to know that if you don’t answer, or if you do answer, regardless of what you say, I will leave you here tonight with the key. May I ask you some questions?”

“Yes. Yes, sir.”

“Do you have a safe place to sleep?”

He hesitates.

“You don’t have to answer.”

“No one has harmed me. Not since-,” he cuts himself off.

“Not since you left Alternian space?”

He nods. You don’t immediately pursue this admittance of what might have happened before.

“Not being harmed is not the same thing as being safe, or feeling safe. Do you have a place to sleep?”

“There is a cot at the garage should an employee need to stay overnight in pursuit of their duties.” He doesn’t meet your gaze.

“Is that where you sleep?” A nod.

“Does your boss know?” A headshake.

“Mr. Zahhak, I am going to ask you something else. Keep in mind that you do not have to answer, but please do not lie.” He is still tucked up, defensive, and you know that he has accepted your deal and that he will feel that he has no choice but to answer. You are cruel to be kind.

“Mr. Zahhak, how far along is your gestation?” You can hear the physical halt of the flow of air as he stops breathing for a second. You can see the fine trembling of his muscles as he tries to control himself.

“How did you know?” It is whispered, harsh, hopeless.

“It’s not yet entirely obvious, but I have carried and recognized some of my own symptoms. Am I correct in assuming that this was not voluntary on your part?” It is an abstract reduction of rape, but he’s already living inside the consequences, you don’t need to grind it in further.

“Yes.” It’s a tiny and quiet exhalation.

“You’ve been in Federation space for five months. Do you have a second to help you with the emergence?”

“No.” It’s said with an almost determination and now it is your breath that catches. Taller, stronger, so much younger than you, he has admitted that he intends to let the grub or grubs emerge as they will, and if he dies of it, he will not resist. You had thought that your cross-quadrant human-style relationship with Cronus, your parenting/lusus relationship to Karkat, and John, and Davey, and Rosie was more than enough to satisfy any ancestral yearnings you might have for a pale quadrant, but you were _wrong_.

All that you love is still equally valuable as it was a few seconds before, but now something in you is demanding to protect this troll, this not-child, not-adult, brave enough to forge forward among aliens in a strange world, but too broken to value his own life.

What you are about to do will cross a line. Earth humans are very wary of teacher-student relationships, where the potential abuse of a power differential is assumed to be guilty until proven innocent. It is an opinion of which you approve. Earth humans are also usually profligate with their pale emotions, and don’t always believe that a truly, exclusively, pale relationship is conciliatory without being concupiscent. Humans also like to leave the dissection of mental issues and feelings to licensed professionals, yet still view the use of such professionals as an admission of weakness. Trolls would see less shame in a professional concupiscent hire than in a professional diamond. You feel like you cannot _not_ do this, but perhaps you are lying because you _want_ to do it.

“Horuss,” you say, and you cross the short distance between you, kneel to catch his downcast gaze, to get below him so that you are as unthreatening as possible. You place a hand on his and he doesn’t resist. He looks you in the eyes and, without his glasses, he looks so very young.

“You don’t want to die. You enrolled in classes here. There are easier, less expensive ways to pass time if you’re just waiting. What do you really want?”

“I have selected the vocation of civil engineering as it seems to most closely follow how… how I would have served the Empire.”

“Do you want to be a civil engineer?”

“I… I want to fix things.”

“What kind of things?”

“Broken things, things that others may see no use for because they lack value. The Empire…” His breath hitches and he looks away. You know that he has connected what he feels to what he said, that he considers himself one of these broken things and that he doesn’t think anyone would see value in salvaging him. You are bleeding diamonds for this child.

“The Empire…?”

“The Empire builds roads and fortresses. The Empire repairs ships, but not trolls. I have… dabbled… in bioengineering and prosthetics. The Empire did not approve of my… ingratitude to their assigned vocation or the waste of medical and engineering resources in… fixing… warmblooded… trolls who would have been culled.”

He looks up, looks you in the eyes, determined, earnest, and something in you is relieved, triumphant.

“I… I was never disloyal to the Empire until the Empire threw me away. I would have served. I would have served well wherever they placed me. All my… side projects… were on my own allowance. I never thought of, never counseled, treason. I WANTED TO SERVE! Why was that not enough?” The hand under yours is a fist. He’s hurting, lost, but angry now, and you think that this is what he needs, to lance the wound until everything spills out and he can put it back together in a way that makes sense.

You try to answer.

“The Empire is very old and not always efficient. It is accustomed to having a surplus of trolls and it has become wasteful of the value of life. A ship, a road, each are costly, but in their own way easy to repair. Horuss, surgery and prosthetics engineering are valued fields on Earth, on Beforus, in the Federation. And bioengineering is one of the ways that the Empire is still ahead of the Federation, but it is the Federation that uses it more wisely, to fix, to create, and not merely to break a helmsman to their ship. You can study what you want here. You can do the work that best matches your inclinations. You can earn respect for your talents and who you are, but you can’t do any of that if you are dead. That would be a terrible waste.”

You squeeze his hand, release, and his fist loosens, wrist turns so that your hand is now on the callused but sensitive palm and fingers and he is holding your hand as much as you are holding his. You are still holding his gaze and his pupils are wider than the light in the room dictates.

“Horuss. I want to help you. Is that acceptable to you? Is that what you want?”

He looks at you with his brows lightly furrowed, like this is its own alien concept, like he can understand helping others, but can’t understand why he would deserve help. You see the moment when he takes a great leap, the moment he becomes yours. The rest of his story spills out, you hold hands and you feel vengeance try to take hold in the embers of your banked anger. You hold hands and you open yourself to his pain and you refuse to drown in it.

“They charged me with tax evasion. It wasn’t a business. None of my… patients… could have paid for the materials I used.” Something in you is already so proud of him, though it is none of your doing.

“They sentenced me to forty lashes, ten each for each of my patients. And maybe at that point I was a traitor, because that was not half of the trolls I assisted and I… I did not correct the charges.” This is followed by a grimace, a sort of dark-humored smile. This clever diamond-brilliant child, you applaud the guile hidden in his huge form.

“They chained me for the subjugglators. I was certain that I would die. When they were done… when they were done, I wanted to.” His voice lowers until the last is a whisper.

He shivers now, clutches your hand harder, and you, you who worked so hard to replicate the necessary conditions to jumpstart a gestation, you know what must have come next. It is ridiculous to try to rank one kind of rape above or below or precisely equivalent to another, but you know what would have broken you worse when you were his age, battling yourself more than any other. He is hunched now, fingers still tangled in yours, strength carefully reserved so as not to injure you, hair a curtain around his face, a curtain you lean toward so that you can reach one hand up to hover inches away. He may not be able to see it, but there is absolutely no doubt that, this close to his horns, he knows exactly where you are. He moves his head the last few inches and now your hand is at his temple, thumb within reaching distance of his vulnerable eyes. He sighs and folds in as much as he can over his thickened waist, trying to get closer to you.

“…I woke up alone with a mediculler. They injected me with something. It was foalish, but… I thought that they were either culling me or patching me up so that I might serve. The pain retreated. I felt warm, too hot. My… it emerged and I didn’t want it to, tried to stop it. The mediculler… stroked it, put fingers up my nook. _Then they pailed me_. I wanted it to _stop_ but they didn’t listen, _I couldn’t stop myself_. I came… I shamed myself. I woke up still chained in the transport cell, surrounded by other swapped culls. They must have been able to smell it, all of them.” He is fit to shake apart. You move your hand from his temple to grab the blanket, and he moves his head after it. You stroke his head and grab the blanket again, manage to mostly wrap it around him and get your hand back in place to comfort without knocking him down with a full papping. He gathers himself, so strong, and forges on.

“At the Ellis Quarantine and Intake Colony, my records named me nine sweeps, and… I failed to correct the discrepancy. They tested me for disease and assigned me a parole officer in Chicago ‘due to my crime’.” You mentally bless the bureaucrat whose dark sense of humor equated tax evasion to Chicago, whatever brought him from there to here. It is possible that someone else would have noticed his condition, would have reached out. It is far more likely that he would be a statistic in a few short months from now.

There is something hard and sharp and triumphant in you that thinks of the Alternian Empire and wants to hurt and hurt and hurt it. But you now know, in a visceral and no longer just intellectual way, that the Empire’s own worst enemy is itself. It tossed this young gem, inculcated in the most modern of Alternian bioware techniques, like he was so much trash. Horuss, and the Federation, will both be the better off for its stupidity.

“There was one other troll in the shipment with the same assignment, but all the other adults were determined to be dangerous and assigned elsewhere. I don’t know what happened to the younger ones. It was… very crowded and loud in the city. The program covers assistance with obtaining vocational training. Earth vehicles are simple and the garage was outside of the city. The owner is very generous, she encouraged me to enroll.” Here he stops, as if to say “That is all, here is the sum of my life, there is nothing else to surrender, do with me what you will.”

“You are incredible.” You tell him, and his head jerks up, away from your hand.

“I assure you professor, I am not lying, not now.”

“My apologies, I know that you are being very truthful, and I appreciate your trust. What I mean is that it took great strength of spirit to do everything that you have, to survive as you have, and to continue as you have. I admire that.”

He looks perplexed, as if now he thinks you are lying, and you have a sudden sympathy for Cronus, your one-troll cheerleading squad, battling it out with your insecurity demons.

“I would like to ask you something, but first I need to tell you something.” He nods, trusting, though not yet bent back down into your hand.

“My relationship with my concupiscent partner is both flushed and pale, like many human marriages. If we had to categorize it under Alternian terms, it would be matespritship, but with overtures into pale feelings. Outside of that, we have a child for whom we are both parents, somewhere between lusii and more pale feelings, and will likely have more in the future. We both have many relationships that fit best in the human friends category. I have no moirail, not separate from my relationship with my spouse. I believe that you need a friend, or possibly a moirail, and would like to make you the offer, though not without explaining my obligations. If you are uncomfortable with that, now or later, I will not bring it up again unless you ask, and I will still do everything I can to connect you with the resources for both the emergence and your continued studies, whatever field, unless you request that I do not.”

“Yes!” he is clutching you hand and his head is quirked in a manner that otherwise would be comical, pushing into your other hand and still doing his best to maintain eye contact, blue and gray eyes more blue as tears well and drop.

“Yes to which part?” It feels cruel but you have to be absolutely sure.

“Diamond-yes,” and his shoulders shake with pent up grief, a dam broken, the downhill fields swamped, but likely to grow back the better for it. You muster your knees, with a thought of thanks to Cronus for the soft carpet, and slid up so that he can lean into you, run a hand over his face in comfort until he runs dry, offer him another water bottle, and pap him for the first time, so, so carefully. His huge form falls in slow motion like a tree and you scoot out as he goes down, tuck a pillow under his head, pull the blankets up. In moments, he’s asleep. You tidy up, pull the little table over and leave him water, granola bars, and a note pinned down under the key. You leave your home and cell phone numbers, the time you’ll be back in tomorrow morning, a reminder of where the bathrooms are, and an admonishment that he is to use your office phone if he needs anything. You doubt he will, and you are determined to be back in early tomorrow.

You pack up and dim the lights to their lowest-not-entirely-off level, slip out, lock the door, and text Cronus that you’re leaving now. The walk home is cool and you are both exhausted and bleeding diamonds.

You think about how lucky you have been.

*

The professor of your huge first year overview of criminal psychology course is more strict than most; you have assigned seating in the amphitheater. You don’t know what her methodology is, it’s not alphabetical, or, as far as you can tell, related to race or gender or height or dorm or year or major or the alphabet, English or Alternian. (You have a distinct memory of a sixth grade teacher who would never have dreamed of arranging the humans by skin tone but had arranged the trolls by “rainbow”.) You arrived early, but the long and the short of it is that you’re now seated, trapped against a wall, next to a tall overly-friendly violet troll, who insists on introducing himself, leans just a bit too far into your shared armrest. He doesn’t force a handshake on you. You pretend he’s not there.

At your second class, you arrive five minutes early but the violet is already seated. He stands up, height inconsiderately looming above you as you bristle and vacillate between the age old human riddle of facing your crotch or butt to him to squeeze past. Crotch wins because you don’t want to turn your back to him. You sit and he greets you by name, the last syllable distinctly drawn out, invasively savored as if he’s contemplating a more thorough examination of the phonetically similar body part.

You distinctively remember that you did not introduce yourself, but know that the seating chart is publicly posted by the door. Your head jerks up, but whatever game he’s playing you won’t give him satisfaction. Cronus Ampora, second year criminal justice major and music minor, rugby player and vice president of the rifle team (the seating chart is public and the first rule of war is “know thy the enemy”) WILL NOT WIN.

*

You’re still not sure how it happened, but when you go home for the summer (you’ve never really had a “home” to go to) you end up in a strange alternative universe, orbiting Cronus and his family and their organic goat dairy and vegetable farm in what you suspect is “the country” or possibly, according to precociously thirteen Porrim, “left titty cupcake”.

You learn more about goat care and mammalian lactation and fermentation then you wanted to know, learn how free range chickens hide their unfertilized ova, learn to fake a not-as-fake-as-previously smile while cajoling strangers into consuming samples of laboriously cultivated goat squeezings. As it turns out, people really like free food, and the type of people who frequent farmers’ markets to shop are usually predisposed to be easygoing as long as you don’t get drawn into arguments about antibiotics, GMOs, and butterflies. You learn that most of the uninspiring vegetables of your experience (canned and frozen and school lunch and even the decent university cafeteria) are just shadows of a tomato still sun warm.

At one point you might accuse Cronus of seducing you with food and he will ask, with a smile that encourages you to disregard what he says, and eyes that are deadly serious, “Is it working?”

The summer is a warm pleasant memory of sunshine and dust and the not-all-bad fatigue of honest work. Cronus teaches you to drive stick shift over the long interrupted road trip between farmers’ markets. You only strand the two of you in one ditch, and manage, together, to push the truck back out.

Cronus gets plenty of smiles with his toothy seadweller dentition on display above his “Eat More Kale” shirt. He has a pantry closet of them, courtesy of Porrim, and other vendors. Your favorite is “Asparagus the Cat”, green and stripy and nonchalant, tail a spear of the shoot vegetable you recently tried and found not entirely objectionable. One of your sets of temporary foster parents had a gray cat. You can’t remember their names, you were only there for maybe a week, but the cat was Charlie and sometimes he would sleep beside you, warm and nonjudgmental.

Throughout your childhood, your adolescence, your early adulthood, you lived inside the walls of your anger. The gray cat was one of the few visitors who made it past the prison gate. There were others, people and animals both, but you made yourself unpleasant enough that you seldom stayed in one place for long and with each move would-be friends fell away again until it was once again only you.

You made it into the University on the strength of your intellect, though certainly not your wisdom. You weren’t going to leave without your degree, preferably with a _summa cum laude_. Cronus found you in the one place from which you refused to run, a combination of scholarships you’d never be able to regain, and defiance, like you thought even now someone would dispute your right to be there. You have no doubt that in a few short years you would have graduated and lost yourself within a job, perhaps maintaining polite relations with a few coworkers, only to return to an empty apartment for the rest of your life, perhaps a cat. Looking back now, you can wish that your younger self had reached for help sooner, can hope that you would have had the courage to reach if Cronus hadn’t stormed your gates. You had thought you were a loner. You were so lonely and you didn’t even know.

In the evening, as the light fails, everyone is finishing up or in the kitchen, where Cronus, the second oldest, gathers you in with his younger siblings, Frannie, 17, and Bridgette, 14, and Porrim, 13, and Lisel, 8. The oldest, AnneMarie, is 25 and works on the west coast somewhere. Cronus’s mother Debbie runs an assembly line of dinner making and that summer you pick up some very useful tips regarding both how to cook and how to plan. Most priceless of all, you learn what a family can be like when they are a cohesive unit, instead of strangers sojourning in the same locale until fate bids them elsewhere. Cronus invites you, but Debbie and Hans make sure you feel welcome.

You fall just a little bit more in love with Cronus with how he treats his sisters, and you’d be hard pressed to say which is his favorite, which is his moirail, or the human style analogue. Or perhaps he has completely assimilated, he was adopted at the minimum age for Beforan grubs to go off-planet, just a few months old. Perigees.

Between a mix of appointed troll and human foster parents, you’ve never been easy with the exact canon of human relationships or troll quadrants, always something in you insisting that what you feel, what others display, is wrong. Both systems can’t be absolute, but you can’t decide what is right. You are a mess, but you learn to love that Cronus doesn’t try to change you, that he wants to help you resolve your feelings, not because he wants to make you feel a particular way, but because it hurts him that you’re confused, upset. That summer is the first time in as long as you can remember that you find yourself calm enough to not be angry.

Frannie is the closest in age to Cronus, and she’s Debbie and Hans’s only biological child. Cronus teases her about her boyfriend, but she teases right back about his broken promise to help her get her learner’s permit driving in, kindly not drawing you into the middle. There’s a gleam in his eye that makes you think Frannie’s boyfriend had better behave. You imagine that they must have had some time as the closest in age before Bridgette, that he must have been so proud not to be the younger one.

Bridgette has dark liquid eyes, a brown close to black, or possibly pupils so light-hungry they yawn. Her hair is the shade called mouse brown and she moves differently from her sisters. When Bridgette and Cronus pass one another, they tend to just glide by with what looks like no space between, but without the rustle of cloth touching, like two swimmers. Of course, sometimes Bridgette jabs a shoulder into the meat of his arm or back instead, carefully not going for his gills, but you can still hear the thump. She smiles easily and her teeth are almost troll respectable. She has a series of tee-shirts with fish screen-printed on them, most of them telling the viewer that “If you don’t like it, you can kiss my Bass.” Debbie seems to sigh a bit, but doesn’t object until Bridgette tries to leave the house in one.

Porrim is a mature thirteen, and while she completes her chores and deals out measures of sarcastic scorn at Cronus as her sisters gang up on him, she is mostly preoccupied with her interests in the old barn, which has been converted into an art studio. AnneMarie, unable to pack up and carry off her enormous screen printing press, had ceded control to her siblings, and Porrim is the principal beneficiary. As the summer progresses, she extends her line until, next to the goat cheeses, vegetables, herbs, and eggs, you are also selling “Covered in Cheeeeeese” (Eddie Izzard being chased by winged cheeses), “Lettuce Rejoice” (salad greens in choir robes), and “Sentient Beans: Garbanzo, Lima, Navy, Fava, Soylent Lime Green”. The bean shirt has a series of outlines on it not unlike police chalk lines, with and without horns.

Hans is quieter than all his family members. He works hard and smiles often. He tells you that you are welcome, and after that, not much unless you ask first.

*

Things get very crowded with Horuss in the house and Porrim back to help. Cronus is due in just six weeks, mid-December, _dear Santa if I believe will you take care of it this year?, _and Horuss in less than four months, exact date unknown. Karkat is suspicious of the newcomer at first but soon your bossy tyrant is directing him the same way he coordinates his other minions. There is more room inside the van in your driveway than in your house. Porrim is rooming with Karkat and Horuss is living a nomadic lifestyle within your family room, couch folded out at night, and everything packed up by day, while he takes classes or works on homework. You are all regularly haunting the kitchen just to get some space.

You retreat to the basement one Saturday with your grading and papers to work in the laundry corner, only to find Cronus already there with his laptop. The two of you huddle back to back on the carpet on the floor and work in relative silence, accompanied by each other’s breathing and the repeated thumping of Karkat, John, Dave, Rose, and Kanaya as they use your bed as a trampoline overhead. Porrim has agreed to watch them. As long as she can’t find you, (as long as she doesn't look), you can probably get two hours of work in before it’s all hands on deck for lunch.


	8. Chomper and Princess

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cute. All the cute.

December arrives with snow, wreathes on both outer doors, and a tiny potted pine tree because there's no room for anything else.

Cronus’s emergence goes textbook perfect, if you can call something that when it has never been described in much detail in any scholastically acknowledged literature. The full gestation period passes, then another week, before he feels the first pinch, conveniently on a Saturday when everyone is home. You text Anne and Phil and tell Karkat that he needs to stay in his room until you come for him.

Cronus braces himself against the kitchen cabinets as Porrim neatly opens him and passes you first a tiny chubby fantailed violet and then an equally chubby yellow with four tiny horn buds. You clean them up and cradle them to you. They both squeak and wiggle and while their eyes are still shut, when you tuck them into your shirt to keep them warm, they both latch on to your feeding scar and suckle. It is unexpected and, while physically uncomfortable, very, very reassuring.

Porrim cleans Cronus out and stitches him up. At first he tries to tough it out regarding the painkiller but you pull your shirt open to show that both of them are already feeding, that he doesn’t have to worry, and he lets her administer the injection. Horuss helps guide him down so he doesn’t hit his head. You are grateful that not only does it appear that they are all well, but that this was as gentle as could be expected for Horuss to witness. Anne and Phil arrive shortly to take Karkat for the night so there’s no chance of him landing on Cronus tomorrow morning. He has a stubborn slant to his mouth but he doesn’t protest.

You don’t name them immediately, though you do call Debbie to let her know, message Latula and Mituna. You call Phil and Anne and talk to Karkat, reassure him that Cronus and his siblings are fine, that Cronus just needs a good night’s sleep and he can come back tomorrow.

Cronus is groggy but in good spirits the next morning, so you call Anne again and then help Porrim cook a huge mess of breakfast. Horuss sets the extensions in the table and puts out forks and fills glasses. It feels surreal to be making breakfast and setting up for a family meal when last night Porrim was mopping up amniotic fluid from the linoleum.

There’s a knock and you open the door and catch Karkat as he launches himself at you. He hugs you tightly and you hug him back, pet his back as he clings. John comes in next, then Rose. Phil and Anne follow. You invite everyone to help themselves and the adults distract the children as you carry Karkat out to the living room and down the hall. You hug him tightly and tell him that you missed him but you know he’s going to be a great big brother and that grubs are very fragile and that Cronus will be fine but that he can’t climb on him. You’ve gone over all this before, but he’s clinging so hard you feel badly about sending him away last night. As it was, you were up periodically with feeding and the violet proved that he had a good set of lungs. The yellow is breathing fine but doesn’t seem to be quite so loud about it. You carry Karkat in and you set him down on the bed but you don’t let go.

“Hey, Champ, how you doing?” Cronus has circles under his eyes and pain wrinkles the corners of them, but he’s smiling. The grubs are huddled under a lightweight blanket that Porrim stitched up, set in a circular grub bed she sewed so that you could sleep closely enough to hear them but with sides too steep for them to crawl out just yet. It also has multiple layers to the bottom so you can bundle off messes without incident. Porrim is a saint.

You pull the blanket back and the grubs squeak as you expose the violet’s tail. The violet manages to turn and look at you both. Karkat leans in and pets them, oh so gently. You praise that gentleness and warn him that the grubs have teeth, so he should be careful of that too. You lift him up and onto the bed, seating him by Cronus, next to the grub-bed. You pull the blanket off a little further and the yellow raises their head, blinks. The milky layer on their eyes is fading so the violet’s eyes are gray water and clouds, but the yellow’s are mismatched, white over red, white over blue, clouds over Jupiter’s red spot, clouds over blue earth sky. The yellow is every bit as plump and active as their clutchmate and you are jubilant.

Karkat pets the yellow and receives an enthusiastic bite. He jumps but doesn’t shake his hand, waits for the grub to release his finger. He scoops the yellow up before the grub quite knows what’s happening. Little grub legs flail and Karkat gently dumps the yellow on their back in his lap, pins them down with one flat hand, tries to reach the violet with one hand, while the yellow squirms. You scoop up the violet and put them next to their clutchmate before you can see the unfortunate result of this one-handed venture. Karkat rolls the violet over so both are on their backs and they both try to flip over, instinctively knowing it to be a more vulnerable position. He tickles their bellies so that they curl, stops and just rests his hands on them. Both grubs blink up at him and seem to wait, surprisingly free of further protest.

You can see that twist to Karkat’s expression that means he’s getting possessive. You suppose that it was inevitable and, not a terrible thing in an older sibling. Your eldest looks down at his new little siblings and pronounces, quite clearly, “Eridan and Sollux. You’re _late_ , bug munchers!”

*

The names stick. They just seem to fit. You continue to hope that at least a few years pass before Karkat actually graduates to “buttmuncher”. You really don’t know where he gets it. There’s a swear jar in the kitchen with all of two dollars in it, one for two months ago when Cronus dropped a pitcher and broke it over his foot, and one from almost six months ago when you did something not entirely dissimilar. The two of you have spent the last few pre- and post-Karkat years aggressively reprograming yourselves to use “oh fudge” and “sugar” instead. On the few occasions when you truly argue, you manage a positively vicious amount of vehemence into the epithet “sweetheart”. And Horuss would sooner faint of dehydration then deliberately utter a vulgarity.

As the days pass you are able to definitively determine that the grubs are competing with each other. If one is fed, the other demands it, sometimes trying to push the first away. You have further reason to be grateful that horns only start as buds because if they had miniature versions of adult headgear, someone would have lost an eye.

They take new grub formula and blood with equal enthusiasm and you feed them with relief and love and pride and sometimes the slow static blinking of sleep deprivation. Cronus tries to go off the painkillers and antibiotics to help, but you ask him to wait a little longer. His emergence scar is healing nicely, but it would be better to get it a little further along before he goes off the antibiotics. He accepts this logic with more grace than you would have and sticks to formula when he feeds them. His hands are wider than yours and when one of the grubs curls up he can hold them easily and securely in just the broad palm and cradle of his hand. You’re not too tired to find this very, very sexually appealing.

Porrim helps immensely, as before, and Horuss finds himself more fascinated than he thought he would. He holds your tiny offspring carefully and doesn’t flinch or jerk when Sollux bites him and simultaneously makes a deposit. You help Horuss wipe off most of it and would relieve him of Sollux but your grub is still clamped on. Horuss gently, so gently, runs one finger over each of those tiny hornbuds and Sollux sparks for the first time, lets go of his finger, sparks, bites him again. The second bite lands outside of a callus and breaks the skin and your tiny ambitious spawn makes little slurping noises as he drinks from his prize. Horuss smiles and you think you might be overwhelmed by all your pale gushy feelings for both of them.

Some people would be off put about a baby that’s so hard to hold without injury, but Horuss is very proprietary. You wonder if this means Karkat is not the only older sibling in the house and are hopeful for what this might mean for Horuss's own.

There’s a bit of handwringing about it, but you all decide to go with male pronouns and see if you were wrong when they pupate. It worked for Karkat at least.

Sollux is a mouthy grub, nothing is safe from his little snaggleteeth, not hands, not clothes, not furniture. You obsessively avoid putting him anywhere he might reach something dangerous, and obsessively worry about when he gets coordinated enough to start climbing more. You put locks back on everything and aggressively organize until the only mess left is in Karkat’s room. You briefly survey the mess of toys and books and unmatched socks, survey your wide-eyed eldest as he braces himself for a fight and you give in and check the latch and give him a stipulation that he keep the door shut so the grubs don’t get in. You think he’s more afraid of Sollux shredding his books than either of them choking, but he’s only five, you’ll settle for compliance over logic.

You eventually learn that the best way to keep Sollux fed and to also get sleep is to just sleep in the armchair with him bundled under your shirt against your feeding scar. You wake up periodically as he latches back on, but this way he doesn’t go looking for more entertaining prospects. You try to allay your fears with reminders that curiosity is a sign of intelligence. During the day he takes formula just fine.

Eridan, by contrast, is a complete cuddlebug, and clearly has access to some sort of subspace pocket for a few extra sets of lungs. When Eridan wants something, you’ll get one or two little warbles of inquiry and then loud despairing wails if you don’t respond fast enough. The wails shut off promptly when he acquires whatever he wants. You remind yourself how grateful you are that they’re both healthy. You really hope that this is a phase. You can’t leave the grubs awake and alone together for more than a few seconds before Sollux is trying to chomp on Eridan and Eridan is wailing, not that you blame him.

Auntie Porrim starts humming the theme song from Jaws whenever Sollux starts that certain purposeful propulsion and head motion that means he’s hunting. Auntie Porrim has also started reading her vampire romance novels to both grubs. Horuss reads them things titled “basic physics for children” and “my first circuits”. It’s sweet of both of them to give them so much attention and help wear them out, so you don’t quibble about the subject matter or how little likelihood there is that they understand any of it. Karkat insists that they both have to start over anytime someone continues while he’s gone at school.

You bathe the grubs one at a time in the kitchen sink on the third day and establish that the warmth is a great way to get Sollux sleepy enough to cuddle safety for everyone involved. You also establish that Eridan’s gills are already working. You only hyperventilate a little, because what if you _hadn't_ used the chlorine-free water?!

A few days after Cronus gets off the antibiotics, you switch with him and take Eridan for the night while he takes Sollux. You don’t hear so much as a peep from Sollux as long as he has something to sink his teeth into. Eridan will sleep most of the way through the night as long as there’s sustenance about halfway through, and he doesn’t go for blood if you get him formula in a timely manner. You’re already buying the sushi-grade beef and salmon for Cronus. Horuss won’t touch it, but Karkat puts more than a small dent into your efforts to keep Cronus in protein. You suspect that your near future involves a lot of pureed meat and your further future involves a lot of very expensive meat. Karkat has trained Sollux to sit up on his hindmost legs for a chance to sink his teeth into something tasty that doesn’t yelp back. You confiscate the training lure and spoonfeed Sollux minute amounts of strained beef instead. He attacks the spoon.

Auntie Porrim sends out the birth announcements and you put a foot down for the future mental stability of your spawn over her artistic license because they go out with a sweet picture of Karkat holding both of his little sibs in a rare moment free of anyone crying or getting chomped instead of the babies wrapped in the grub cozies she made them.

Sollux is adorable as a tiny gray shark with yellow racing stripes and Eridan strangely apt as a hapless green-tailed mermaid, complete with purple shell bra and red yarn wig. You still disagree when she campaigns to re-name them Chomper and Princess.

You know that she probably doesn’t mean it, but Cronus is in enough pain and short enough in the sleep department that he’s grouchy if you give him half an excuse. Karkat watches their argument like a spectator at a tennis match hoping for a fight to break out. You see Cronus get riled up enough to sneer and you scoop up your eldest and turn just in time so that he doesn’t see CrowMom flipping off Auntie Porrim. Your precocious eldest spawn doesn’t need to add that to his repertoire.

Still, you tuck away the pictures of “Chomper” and “Princess” to keep in reserve as leverage against teenage shenanigans, just like the ones of Karkat in the jello bowl. Cronus is really lucky that he’s older than Porrim. You kind of regret that that means there won’t be any likewise embarrassing photos of him.

Porrim bides her time, steals your phone, and waits for you to be at work finishing the last of the semester's grading, waits for Horuss to be taking his last exam, Karkat to be in school, and Cronus to be napping. She screws heavy hooks with safety latches into your otherwise untouched period mantel cluttered with Karkat's drawings, slides the dozing grubs, one each, into stockings with their names, suspends them, snaps a few pictures with her phone, Cronus's phone, and your phone, then sends them to the entire family before you can object. She also sends them to Phil, Anne, Dirk, Latula, Mituna, Police Chief Redglare, and your entire department. You have no idea what's going on until you start getting replies back. You tell her you will remember this if she ever has spawn of her own.

Porrim further declares that she’s claiming your spawn as work related expenses and she starts knitting and sewing grub cozies in all sorts of permutations to sell on her etsy page. The advent of two new models seems to have rekindled her muse, previously preoccupied with her screen-printing, but all but the designing portion of production having been put on hold while she’s stayed with you. She has to make the cozies a few sizes up for her page as most, if not all, of her buyers are dressing older grubs, adoption aged grubs, but she appears to enjoy the challenge.

Tiny princess dresses and mermaid costumes, carrots and cabbages, and several varieties of very bright flowers join her original peapod bunting and she makes a polarfleece swaddling version of the shark cozy for Sollux, for outside trips. She makes one for Eridan, a sort of gray multilayered cone like a megaphone from which he emerges head first. This is clearly a statement of favoritism and by day ten of long nights of relay running in response to grub wails, you can’t blame her. The hum of her sewing machine on the kitchen table, just on the other side of the wall from your headboard, accompanies your swift drop into sleep every night.

Karkat likes putting his little brothers down on the kitchen floor and racing them. Porrim makes Eridan a little turtle cozy with bumpers and he scoots around the perimeter of the kitchen until he finds someone to pick him up. Sollux has already made his mark on the kitchen chairs and you remind yourself that it will only be a month before they’re not just likely, but definitely developed enough for more solid food. You could risk it now, but you’re terrified of them choking, even after the best efforts of your immersion blender. Cronus is a saint and doesn’t laugh at even your most wildly fantastical worries.

Sollux skitters with all six of his legs while Eridan usually meanders forward at more sedate pace with his tail just dragging. The exception is when Sollux is cruising for a target and inevitably beelines for anyone moving. He’ll go for feet and ankles, but his favorite target is Eridan, who gets very good at his own urgent beeline for the nearest set of ankles to rescue him. He sounds like a tiny ambulance when he wails as he skitter-sprints with his tail raised, eyes wide, and you cluck your tongue understandingly instead of laughing. Porrim puts Sollux back in the striped shark cozy and makes another dozen or so. You don’t object. It’s a sort of truth in advertising when you have visitors. It also makes it easier to find him because even if he manages to wedge himself under something, he usually doesn’t manage to drag the whole tail in behind him and it makes a safe handle to gently extract him.


	9. A full house

Mituna and Latula visit when the grubs are two months old and on their first really chewable foods, not that Sollux hasn’t been helping himself previously. Latula looks like a miniature friendly Redglare, much to Cronus’s kneejerk surprise. Mituna appears to approve of all your spawn, though not in so many words. He brings gifts anyways. Karkat gets a box of non-toxic edible pudding finger-paints and a drum set, though if Mituna thinks this is the worse you’ve dealt with as a parent, he’s a lightweight.

Latula brings Cronus an expensive box of Alternian seaweeds which are pretty much impossible to find legally on earth for less than a king’s ransom. She assures you both that her supplier is reliable and they should help him heal up. Eridan certainly seems interested, snagging a strand and making a break for it down your leg before Sollux gives chase.

Karkat deftly separates them before you can and plops Eridan in Latula’s lap, where she flatters him outrageously and sneaks him more seaweed. Sollux gets plopped in Mituna’s lap, where the two yellows promptly have a staring contest until the younger defecates without blinking and wins. You snatch Sollux back up and grab a hunk of paper towels for your guest, cheeks so red you feel like you might spontaneously combust.

Mituna is blank faced and you’re afraid that he’s either back at the Empire’s helm or about to erupt. Porrim offers him a pair of Cronus’s pre-gestation sweatpants and a blank t-shirt and he shuffles off to change. Latula laughs about the whole thing, especially when he comes back out, clearly miffed in the way Alternians get when they’re not wearing their sign. You offer him a Sharpie and the rest of the visit goes well enough.

Two weeks later you get a package in the mail from them, more seaweed and something for Sollux. It’s a commercially stitched yellow and black striped grub cozy with “Silent but Deadly” scribbled into one of the yellow stripes on the back, thoroughly saturated in the scent of Mituna’s amusement. Sollux loves it from the moment he first goes swimming inside the baggy depths, even when the scent starts to fade and he can barely be stripped out of it for grub and garment to be laundered separately, leading to a regular wrestling match which gets successively more difficult as he practices his psionics. The finger-paints and drum set were easy to deal with, but this is ridiculous.

You send your message of surrender to Mituna and he sends two duplicates in a size up, also treated with the much coveted scent, just in time for Sollux’s next growth spurt to make the first cozy inaccessible, much to his frustration as accompanied by the first meltdown in his normally mellow grubhood. Latula sends more seaweed and their schedule to arrange their next visit.

Cronus distracts you from worrying over Horuss with links to houses for sale in the area, as you are all pretty much living in one another’s pocket at this point and the tail end of winter has made everyone a bit stir-crazy. You also have no idea how many grubs Horuss will have, or if he’ll keep them.

You visit a few houses with Karkat in tow and cross most of them off. You love your tiny charming house, the location, the neighbors. You just wish it wasn’t _quite_ so tiny.

Mrs. Harley, (call me Jade, dear, _really_ ) comes back to town early, in mid-February this time, just before Horuss is due, and you escape for a few hours with Porrim to help her air out the house and dust and catch up. Your saintly neighbor notes that her grandson Jake will be moving back in while he works on his biology doctorate and that she still has a spare bedroom available should Porrim or Horuss need it. She misses the days when her grandson was small. Perhaps Karkat and his friends might come over and draw a few pictures for the fridge?

Bless her. Jade has a knack for both child-watching and grub-sitting, and seems happy to help, corralling both Sollux and Eridan easily and somehow impressing them enough that they tend to stay mostly where she puts them. She currently holds the title of She-Who-Has-Held-Sollux-Longest-Without-Getting-Chomped. Karkat has likewise always been fond of her and you trust her judgment.

Jake, however, Jake reminds you entirely too much of Cronus’s flirty college days. Dirk seems unwillingly enamored and hesitant, professional capability at odds with his sudden awkwardness, so you don’t push as they seem to enact a slow motion quasi-dating ritual. Personally, you feel that what they both need is a moirail, but far be it for you to meddle, you’ve far too much on you plate as it is.

At every opportunity, you or Porrim herd all the kids over to Jade’s to give Cronus and Horuss a breather. Rosie’s not entirely impressed with Jake, but Davey relays his wild stories of alligator wrestling and whatnot to Dirk with utter solemnity. John appears utterly infatuated and keeps trying to convince Karkat to be the alligator so John-as-Jake can wrestle him. Karkat informs Jake that he is “going to be held accountable for [his] actions”, a phrase borrowed from your own over-repeated parenting truisms, and leverages it, or at least Jake’s easy nature, into endless piggyback rides. Karkat fists one hand in Jake's hair and points with the other in an unintentional ongoing rendition of "Napolean Crossing the Alps" that reoccurs almost every time they see one another.

Porrim cedes Jade’s spare bedroom to Horuss on the grounds that she’s in town on a more temporary basis and he moves in and Jade buys him new sheets and a new comforter with blueprints all over it. She drags him to the local hold out independent music store to find a few posters too, all before you can protest that you’d be happy to cover the expense. Your moirail looks flummoxed, and strangely charmed. He confesses to you that he’s never really met an “older” human. You pat his hand and don’t tell him that some “older” humans tend to get lusial feelings over strays. Jade’s a tough old bird. She’s going to train him how to take kindness as well as give it, and how to do both gracefully. You wouldn’t have minded if she had adopted you a few decades ago. It would have smoothed out a few of your rougher edges.

It’s not that afterwards you’ll think back to these weeks and want to go back to them, but that you wish you could save Horuss some of what came next. The analytical part of you knows that there was really nothing you could do. The part of you that it diamond sharp still wants to carve out selective parts of what followed to spare him.

Horuss goes down in Jade’s kitchen one Monday morning like an apologetic pile of bricks and you yourself would apologize to her for the mess you’re going to make, but there’s no way you can move him, not with Jake in Chicago and Cronus still knitting back together next door. Jade remains calm and gets your three next door where Cronus can look after them while Porrim runs for the emergence kit. You phone in to your department office that your classes are cancelled with one hand and hold Horuss’s shoulder with the other ten minutes before you should have left for work.

Horuss loses a lot more blood than you can remember losing, though your memory of the time is not entirely clear. He loses a lot more than Cronus anyway, though Cronus was in peak physical condition and runs a degree or two cooler. You hold Horuss’s shoulders while he clenches his hands and cracks his teeth into one of Jade’s towels, because there’s no way he can prevent himself from hurting you if you held his hand.

Porrim maintains her calm and after two successful emergences is probably the leading earth expert at this point. At least no one else has admitted to knowing much. She disinfects his entire abdomen, injects him with the painkiller, slices in and quickly fishes out three forms, one thrashing, two quiet. You brace him with both hands and legs as he starts to waver and Jade shows no squeamishness as she cleans and wraps the grubs. One’s clearly dead, she reports, though the others are both breathing well. It’s the gentleness that makes your eyes sting.

Horuss is entirely out now, and you’re holding him steady and upright mainly by virtue of bracing your well-soled shoes on the linoleum and bracing your behind against the cabinets. Your back informs you that it will have its revenge. Porrim is cleaning Horuss out, carefully, because leaving any foreign material in him is an invitation for an infection, and he would doubtless survive, but it can take a long time for anything so far internal to clear up, even for a young healthy troll. He has been bingeing on free online lectures and had hoped to restart school formally in September. You have hopes that he'll catch up with Federation standards soon enough that he'll be teaching some of what he knows not long after.

She pauses as she continues and you see the moment when her face stills and she withdraws a mass too solid to be a caul, then another. Jade doesn’t even have to look before you know what it is. Two parts of a grub. You never thought of it, but if they can chew their way to freedom… of course they could chew each other to pieces.

Porrim sweeps through slowly and empties several bottles of saline in continuous squirts until she’s sure there’s nothing else left behind, checks each caul for missing patches. She uses dissolvable stitches where one of the grubs headed in the wrong direction, then starts to work the incision closed, layer by layer. Horuss is still breathing well. You don’t know if he saw the first three. You don’t know how he’ll feel about them any more than he does. He still doesn’t know if he’s keeping them, and you haven’t pushed. Considering the circumstances… it would not be unreasonable to want to see them before deciding. To want to see who they looked like.

The three of you clean up as best as you can without moving Horuss, and Jade gets some formula into the two survivors. One indigo. One blue, Horuss’s shade. The… stillborn ones mirror them, though you can’t really tell if they were identical.

Dirk shows up, it’s a day off for him this week and he’s left Davey with Cronus. The three of you manage to move Horuss to his bed.

You clean up the dismembered grub, set their halves together and wrap them in gauze and then one of the clean grub cozies, one of the plain ones, you never want to look at one of the silly ones and think of this moment with a tiny would-be indigo, think of Baby, though you know you will, know you already are. Jade protests when you get the other stillborn, but this is something you have to do, something you have to witness for your moirail.

The other stillborn is utterly unmarked, not a scratch, just _pale_ , closer to sky blue than a troll blue. They don’t have any teeth, their hornbuds are mere patches, and their legs aren’t fully developed. They went the full term and are still smaller than Baby was. You wrap them. You think about all the statistics you don’t have, and you know that there was nothing you could have done, and you rage at the trolls that did this to your moirail as punishment.

You set the two forms on the kitchen table for the county coroner and flex your fingers, flex your filed claws, and try to calm yourself. Porrim dumps the tiny blue, now fed, in your arms and they yawn and wave their legs within their onesie and the rage just… subsides.

The blue is Horuss’s shade and may someday look like him, though there’s not much you can tell about them now. Jade asks if you’d like to stay with Horuss, though it’s the type of suggestion that is more of an order, and she resumes her one-sided conversation with the active little indigo once you start to move toward his bedroom, where you sit by the bed and listen to him breathe. You can hear when the county coroner arrives, extends his sympathies, and takes away the other grubs.

There’s a knock on the front door, firm but not very hard, and you hear the front door open and then the unmistakable sound of your eldest. There’s a pause as he no doubt accosts whoever is holding the indigo and you don’t hear anything further for a while until there’s a knock and Davey asks if they can see the new baby.

Horuss wakes up later in the day, though not before Karkat has preemptively named both grubs. You're not sure he's entirely lucid when he agrees to Karkat's demands.

Well, at least "Gamzee" and "Equius" are less objectionable than "Chomper" and "Princess".


End file.
